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FOUR FEET ON A FENDER 



POUR FEET ON 
A FENDER 

Quiet Hour Talks With Women 



BY 

EDWARD LEIGH PELL 




NEW YORK 

E. P. DUTTON & CO. 

681 FIFTH AVENUE 



4% 



COPYRIGHT, 1917, 

Bt e. p. DUTTON & CO. 



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APR 24 1917 

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CONTENTS 

CHAPTEB PAGE 

I When Life is Worth While . . . ,1 
II The Secret of Trusting . . '. .13 

III Blood Kin to Everybody ... 23 

IV The Art of Being a Christian . . 33 
V Giving Christ a Chance in Our Lives 46 

VI Beginning the Day with God . . 59 

VII Soul Feeding 72 

VIII When Prayer is as Natural as Breath- 
ing 83 

IX Companions for a Day's Walk . . 93 

X The Magic Wand 105 

XI The Struggle for Freedom . . .113 

XII Our Children and Ourselves . . 125 

XIII When Love is Love 139 

XIV He Healeth the Broken in Heart . 150 

XV Inasmuch as Ye Did It Unto One of 

These 158 

XVI Over the Empty Cradle .... 168 



FOUR FEET ON A FENDER 



FOUR FEET ON A 
FENDER 



WHEN LIFE IS WORTH WHILE 

WAS it Oliver Wendell Holmes? My 
memory is bad, but it must have been 
Holmes: it would not fit anybody else in the 
world. No doubt you bave heard the story. 
You remember he was the cheeriest of all our 
philosophers until one day when he had reached 
what to ordinary men would have been old age, 
the wife of his youth, was taken from him, and 
then the light in his heart flickered and nearly 
went out. Not very long afterwards a friend 
who was visiting him banteringly questioned 
whether he could express his idea of happiness 
in five words. The old man was silent for a 
moment and then a far away look came into 
his eyes and he said softly : 

^^Four feet on a fender/' 

1 



2 FOUR PEET ON A PENDER 

When I was a child I had a friend whom I 
can never forget. She was the Quiet Lady who 
lived across the street. I think of her still as 
the Quiet Lady. She was one of those women 
whose lot in life is to bear many burdens with 
little aid from the inspiration of human friend- 
ships; yet her face was the most perfect pic- 
ture of peace and contentment I have ever 
known. It used to make me feel that she had 
just been talking to the angels. I would go 
over to see her every day and I knew her ways. 
Every morning, when the rush of household 
cares was over, she would take her Bible into 
the quiet parlor and lock the door. I often 
wondered what she did, for not a sound would 
come from the room for half an hour. Then 
I would hear the click of the lock, and the door 
would open ; and though I was but a little child, 
I must have seen the glimmer of a new light in 
her face, for I felt that something had hap- 
pened. I did not understand it then, but it was 
something like — 

Four feet on a fender. 

Have you ever seen a father and a son who 



WHEN LIFE IS WORTH WHILE 3 

were chums? I hope you have, though it is one 
of the rarest as it is one of the most beautiful 
sights in all the world. I knew a father whose 
son was his chum almost from infancy. They 
were so often seen together that people called 
the boy his father 's shadow. But he was more 
than that; he was his very substance. The 
storms of life had striven hard with the man, 
and he was almost as bare as the trees that 
have been whipped of their autumn leaves, but 
he still felt rich in the possession of his son. 
When the boy was a little fellow he would go 
and kneel down at his father's side at family 
worship, and the father would lay his hand on 
his head; and when he was full six feet tall, 
he continued to go and kneel at his father 's side, 
and the father would place his hand on his head. 
By and by he was taken away, and as he went 
something snapped, and the father 's light went 
out. But one day as the broken-hearted man 
stretched out his hands in the dark for his son, 
there came to him a wonderful sense of the 
nearness of the Unseen, and he began to think 
of his boy and of his own Heavenly Father as 
separated from him only by a thin veil. And 



4 FOUR FEET ON A FENDER 

he talked with the Father about his boy. Every 
day he talked with him and at last one day the 
sense of companionship with his son came back 
to him and with it a deeper sense of companion- 
ship with his Father than he had ever felt be- 
fore. Then life became worth while again — 
doubly worth while; for from that day the 
father sought not only to do his own work for 
God but also to fill his boy's place and do the 
work which he felt his boy would have done for 
God if he had been permitted to remain in the 
world. 

I know a woman who has never found life 
worth while. She says she is living only for 
the sake of her children, but I suppose that is 
a mere habit of speech with her, as it is with 
many other women. Probably, if she should 
take the time to think it through, she would 
conclude that she does not know why she is 
living. She is not anxious to die, but she wakes 
up every morning tired of life. There 's a dull 
headache and a bad taste in the mouth, and a 
weariness in her heart, and she is sorry an- 
other day has come. She does not want to get 
up, but she gets up becanse she must. And 



WHEN LIFE IS WORTH WHILE 5 

tKat means that she always drags herself up. 
Her soul does not know what it is to mount like 
a lark to the sky. And so instead of begin- 
ning the day with a song she begins with a sigh 
— the sigh of a driven slave. She has no appe- 
tite for breakfast, but she eats because she 
must. She cannot bring herself to feel an in- 
terest in her household duties, but she goads 
herself through them because she must. She is 
a poor slave driven by a hard master, and the 
master's name is Must. When she is through 
with the drudgery, she goes out, because she 
must, and joins in the world's mad pursuit, 
pushing her way for the rest of the day through 
a tangled mass of dressmakers' engagements, 
milliners ' openings, crowds, crushes, luncheons, 
•calls, society meetings, club meetings, and what 
not. All because she must. Then she hurries 
back home, every nerve quivering, every muscle 
in her body ^'dead tired," her poor brain 
addled, to find everything gone wrong, includ- 
ing of course the cook. Then there's supper 
and somewhere to go after supper until bed- 
time. 
All because she must. 



6 FOUR FEET ON A FENDER 

She never rests. She says she is too nervous 
to rest, which of course only means that she is 
too nervous to lie down. She does not know 
that her trouble is deeper than her nerves — 
that she is wearied in body because she is sick 
and tired of life, and that she is sick and tired 
of life because she has not found life worth 
while, and that she has not found her life worth 
while because she has tried to live her life 
alone. 

For the poor woman hasn^t a companion in 
the world. Her home is full of loved ones, but 
no companions. Once she had one; it is like 
a dream now, it is so long ago; but Must, the 
cruel master, broke up the quiet moments they 
were having together, and to-day he is only a 
prosy provider, and she is so far away that, 
if he should mention ^^four feet on a fender," 
she would laugh a hollow laugh at his ^^fool- 
ishness." There is a sweet spirit in her daugh- 
ter inviting companionship, but she has had to 
decline the invitation with regrets, as she has 
declined many another — on account of a pre- 
vious engagement. She cannot remember that 
she ever sat alone with Beatrice and kept still 



WHEN LIFE IS WORTH WHILE 7 

long enough for the two spirits to touch each 
other and commune silently together. Beatrice 
is not her chum; she is her care — ^her grind- 
ing, wearing, maddening care. Beatrice must 
come out next winter, and Beatrice must have 
this and that and the other, including a Man, 
and a beautiful home of her own and — 
dear! there's no end to it. 

No, Beatrice is not her chum. She has no 
chums. Out in the world she has admirers and 
wellwishers more than she can count, and 
she calls them friends for convenience' sake. 
There's nothing else to call them. She has so- 
ciety friends and church friends and profes- 
sional friends — for her husband's sake — and 
^ ' summer friends, ' ' and several other varieties ; 
but not a single true friend — not a single soul 
that she could place her own soul up against 
and rest. Also all through the day, all through 
the passing years, there has been One ever at 
her hand, ever ready to speak with her when- 
ever she should care to speak with him — One 
whose companionship for ten short minutes 
would do more to soothe that aching brow and 
smooth out the crows' feet from around those 



8 POUR FEET ON A FENDER 

eyes and quiet those quivering nerves and sat- 
isfy the fearful thirst of her soul than all the 
friends in the world. And she has declined his 
invitation also, just as she has declined Bea- 
trice's — with regret, on account of a previous 
engagement. And as he is not her care — ^like 
Beatrice — she has not given him a single 
thought. She says her prayers when she gets 
up, because she must, but she does not think 
of him. She is in a hurry, and she is thinking 
of something else. 

And so with loved ones around her, and ad- 
mirers and wellwishers without number, and 
the Burden Bearer, blessed Friend of tired hu- 
manity, at her side, the poor woman drags her 
weary way through the world as a thirsty beast 
of burden stumbles through the desert, perish- 
ing for want of companionship as the poor 
beast is perishing for want of water. 

And she wonders why Grod ever started her 
across such a desert. 

God has given us a good many things to 
make life worth while, but here is one thing 
without which life is not worth while, what- 
ever else one may have. This world was not 



WHEN LIFE IS WORTH WHILE 9 

made on the one-man plan. No man liveth unto 
himself; no man can live unto himself. And 
man means woman as well as the other sort. 
Put a man in a dungeon and he quickly realizes 
that he must have companionship, else he will 
either die or go mad. If he knows God, if he 
comes into a sense of companionship with God, 
he can live without any other companion. If 
he does not know God, he will seize upon any 
living thing in his cell and hug it to his bosom. 
He will hold his breath and listen. If he hears 
a mouse, joy will spring up in his heart. He 
will make a companion of the mouse. If no 
living thing is near, he will try to create an 
imaginary companion, as children often do. If 
he fails at that, there is no hope; he will die 
or go raving mad. An animal may exist with- 
out companionship. The animal in a man may 
exist without companionship. But no man can 
live without it. No woman really lives who is 
not living close up to something that responds 
to her own heart beat. 

Life is companionship. Eternal life is eter- 
nal companionship. ^^This is life eternal that 



10 POUR FEET ON A FENDER 

they might know thee, the only true God, and 
Jesus Christ whom thou hast sent.'^ 

And life broadens and deepens and grows 
more precious, more worth while, just in pro- 
portion as our sense of companionship broad- 
ens and deepens and grows more precious, more 
worth while. If I cultivate only human friend- 
ships, life may be worth while to-day, and it may 
be worth nothing to-morrow. If I cultivate the 
friendship of Him who can get closer to my 
spirit than any human being and can stay there 
forever, he will make my life as rich as the 
blessing of heaven. And it will be worth while 
even if I am denied all human companionship. 
The storms of life may sweep all my loved ones 
and friends beyond my sight, but I shall still 
have strength, for when I sit in the twilight 
stillness before my fire there will still be — 

Four feet on the fender. 

My mother was a clinging, tender soul, and 
she leaned upon my father, and he put his great, 
strong arm about her and shielded her as few 
women had ever been shielded. When he was 
taken away, the tender vine was almost torn up 
by its roots, and for a time life had no more 



WHEN LIFE IS WORTH WHILE 11 

meaning. But by and by, when she turned away 
from her own grief and put her arms around 
her little children and cried out of the depths 
unto God for them, there came to her a won- 
derful sense of the nearness of Him who had 
promised to be a husband to the widow, and she 
found such strength in communion with him 
that she was able to rise to her feet and stand 
erect and face the world without a flicker in her 
beautiful eyes. And in this strength and al- 
most without human resource she fed and 
clothed her six children, sent them to school, 
sent them to college, ministered to the needy, 
cooled fevered brows, bathed the temples of the 
faint, refreshed the weary, and made the most 
of each golden moment as the priceless gift of 
God's love. And through it all she was never 
so busy that she could not find the time each 
day to go apart and rest awhile in companion- 
ship with Him who was her only refuge and her 
strength. And to the day of her death, through 
a widowhood of forty years, she was never 
alone. Dark days there were in plenty and 
there were times when the fire burnt low on 
the hearth, but I don't believe there was ever 



12 FOUR FEET ON A FENDER 

a time when she did not feel — certainly never 
a time when she did not believe — that there 
were — 
Four feet on the fender. 



II 



THE SECRET OF TRUSTING 

ONE golden summer day a man sat upon a 
hillside feasting his eyes upon a glorious 
scene that spread out before him. It was in 
the freshness of early morning, and the air was 
balmy and mellow, and the sunbeams danced 
like fairies upon the dewdrops on the grass. 
The sky was as blue as a baby's eyes, and the 
fields as far as the eye could reach were car- 
peted with beautiful flowers, white and purple 
and crimson and gold, and through the heavens 
darted here and there happy birds, leaving the 
echoes of sweet music behind them. 

Presently the man turned and looked into the 
faces of a group of friends who had gathered 
around him, and his heart filled up with pity. 
Never before had he seen a contrast so strange 
and painful. In the outstretched landscape he 
had seen beauty, peace, joy, contentment; but 
the faces before him were seamed with anxiety 

13 



14 FOUR FEET ON A FENDER 

and care, and the eyes that should have reflected 
the calm of heaven were filled with pitiful 
yearning and vague foreboding. 

^^Dear friends," said the man, '^why are your 
hearts so troubled? Why do you consume your 
souls with anxious care? Look at those birds. 
Do they fly as if they carried a burden on their 
hearts? Listen to their music. Do you hear 
one anxious note ? Do they wear out their lives 
with fear for the morrow? They do not even 
toil for a living, and yet your Father feedeth 
them. If God cares for the birds that do not 
toil, will he not care for his own children that 
labor so hard for their daily bread? And those 
beautiful lilies yonder : think of them. Do they 
go with bowed heads all the day, eating their 
hearts out with anxiety for to-morrow? They 
do not even spin a thread for themselves, and 
yet — look at them. Even Solomon in all his 
glory was not arrayed like one of these simple 
little flowers. If your Father clothes the lilies 
which are only here for a few days, and which 
never do anything but hold up their heads to 
the Father's sunshine and the Father's refresh- 
ing dew, will he not much more clothe you, his 



THE SECRET OF TRUSTING 15 

children, whose hands are weary with spinning? 
friends, why are you so anxious? Why is it 
that you cannot believe in God?" 

Who is this stranger with the peaceful face 
speaking with such beautiful confidence of the 
Father's loving care? I heard a saintly old 
man talk that way once — ^not so beautifully in- 
deed, but with perfect sincerity — and when the 
sermon was over, a cynical neighbor said : ^ ^ It 
is very easy for that old man to talk that way, 
for he has enough government bonds laid away 
to last him a lifetime." 

But this Stranger had no bonds. He did not 
have a penny. He did not have a place of his 
own to lay his head. The very clothes he wore 
were the gifts of friends. And, although he had 
divine power to provide for others, he had de- 
nied himself the privilege of using it for him- 
self that he might take his place with us and 
be as dependent as we are upon the Father's 
care. 

It is said that Jesus knew all men and needed 
not that any one should tell him what was in 
man; but there was one thing in the human 
heart for which he seems never to have been 



16 FOUR FEET ON A FENDER 

quite prepared, and that was anxiety. For 
anxiety means that we do not believe in the 
Father, and that was something as strange to 
him as my failure to believe in you would be 
to your child. Knowing the Father as he did, 
the fears of men shocked him. They seemed to 
him utterly against nature. How could any 
sane being doubt the Father? It was as if 
he had happened upon a little band of wan- 
dering children who doubted their own moth- 
ers. It was the only question he seemed bound 
to ask. ^^Why are ye so fearful? How is it 
that ye have no faith?'' 

I once knew a home — no, it was not a home ; 
it was a purgatory — in which the children had 
no faith in their parents. To me it was utterly 
inexplicable. How could a child doubt his own 
father and mother? I was but a child myself; 
and when I heard one day that the big sixteen- 
year-old boy in that purgatory had actually 
doubled up his fist and struck his mother a 
stinging blow, I felt — ^but there are no words 
to tell what I felt. I think Jesus — the human 
Jesus — ^must have had something of the same 



THE SECRET OF TRUSTING 17 

feeling when he looked upon men and women 
who did not believe in their Father. 

If you have ever seen a home wrecked like 
that, you know there is but one thing that will 
bring order out of such chaos. You might fill 
it with music and flowers and singing birds and 
gay and clever friends and all the beautiful 
things which proud mortals use to hide their 
family skeletons; and unless faith came back 
into the hearts of the children, it would still 
be so hideous a place that you could not pass it 
without a shudder. For the world has never 
yet found a substitute for faith. We are given 
to saying that love is the greatest thing in the 
world, and that saying is true; but the most 
necessary thing in the world — the thing with- 
out which love cannot exist — is faith; and 
without faith, whatever else one may have — 
above all, whatever else a wife, a mother, may 
have — ^life is not worth while. 

If I could condense the wisdom and experi- 
ence of all the ages into one word of advice to 
women, I think that word would be : ^^ Whatever 
may happen, hold on to your faith in God and 
man ; for to cease to trust is to cease to live. ' ^ 



18 POUR FEET ON A FENDER 

You have often noticed that wars and di- 
vorces and all like tragedies are nearly always 
preceded by a period of ^'strained relations.^' 
During this period the parties to the quarrel 
get so far apart that they become practically 
strangers. When this point has been reached, 
we know that reconciliation is hopeless unless 
they can be brought together face to face. For 
it is impossible for two nations or two persons 
to understand each other so long as they stand 
aloof the one from the other ; and, unless they 
do understand each other, they can never trust 
each other. That is why no wise woman ever 
undertakes to settle the differences between an 
estranged couple by acting as a go-between. 
She knows that they are already too far apart 
to understand each other and that the only 
thing to do is to bring them together face to 
face as quickly as possible under circumstances 
that will cause them to open their hearts to 
each other. For what estranged persons need 
is simply what strangers need. They need to 
know each other. And so the wise woman, 
instead of talking matters over now with one 
and now with the other, manages to get them 



THE SECRET OF TRUSTING 19 

both out for a drive with her, and perhaps 
drives around through the cemetery and leaves 
them for a little while alone at the grave of 
their firstborn child. And standing there each 
looks into the other's heart and finds that, 
after all, there were no differences to settle; 
they only needed to know each other. 

Often during the Civil War the pickets on 
each side lay in the tall grass but a few rods 
apart; and now and then a ^^Yank," hungry 
for tobacco, or a ^^ Johnny Reb,'' thirsty for 
coffee, would lift his handkerchief on his bay- 
onet above his head as a flag of truce, and the 
picket opposite would respond, and in another 
moment they would be lying side by side on 
the line swapping tobacco and coffee and war 
stories ; and after a time each would crawl back 
to his side wondering what in the world they 
were fighting for. For in those short fifteen 
minutes they would learn each other and dis- 
cover what the North and the South had long 
before forgotten, that they were brothers, and 
that as brothers they could trust each other. 
Can you imagine that if all the soldiers on both 
sides had come together on the line and swapped 



20 FOUR FEET ON A FENDER 

tobacco and coffee and war stories and opened 
their hearts the one to the other — can yon 
imagine that there wonld have been any more 
fighting? 

And what does all this mean? Simply this, 
that if we want to hold on to our faith in God 
and man and make onr lives worth while we 
must know them better. This is the teaching of 
experience, and it is the teaching of the Book. 
^^For faith,'' says the Book, ^^cometh by hear- 
ing, and hearing by the word of God. ' ' If we 
will get close to men and listen to the word 
that comes from their hearts, we shall, as a 
rule, learn to trust them; and if we will get 
close to the Father and listen to his word as 
we read his book and as we talk with him in 
prayer, and as we seek to do his will, we shall 
learn to trust him. 

I know there are pious folk who still con- 
tend that faith is ours for the asking, but it 
is not true. If we shun God and make no ef- 
fort to get acquainted with him, we may ask 
him to send us faith until doomsday and we 
shall never get it, any more than we shall get 
bread if we refuse to sow the seed the Father 



THE SECRET OF TRUSTING 21 

gives us and wait for him to send us ready- 
baked loaves. 

A year ago a stranger moved next door. You 
did not like her looks and you found yourself 
regarding her with misgiving. You felt that 
you would never believe in her. To-day you 
believe in her as you believe in your own 
mother. What wrought the wonderful change? 
Did you go to see her three months after she 
came and tell her that for some unaccountable 
reason you did not have confidence in her and 
beg her to help you to trust her? And then did 
you stay away and wait for her to do some- 
thing that would give you confidence in her? 
You would not treat a neighbor that way. You 
have never treated any one but God that way. 
You believe in your neighbor to-day because 
you cultivated her acquaintance. That is the 
only reason. 

And if you ever believe in God it will be for 
the same reason. 

Is it not strange that although our Father 
has been next door to us all these years and 
has done so many things to help us find him 
out — ^has given us a Book that lets us into the 



22 FOUR FEET ON A FENDER 

secrets of his great heart and never lets a 
day pass without doing something to show his 
love for ns, — is it not strange that so many 
of us should have the effrontery to send him 
word from day to day that we are still doubt- 
ing him and to please do something that will 
help us to believe in him? 



Ill 



BLOOD KllSr TO EVERYBODY 

PEEHAPS you know how it is. When 
troubles come they come in troops. And 
troubles had come to my friend in troops — al- 
most in battalions. I have seen a tree sud- 
denly set upon by a savage wind and whipped 
of its autumn leaves until it looked like the up- 
stretched hand of a skeleton. My friend looked 
like that. I was saying this, and more, to Miss 
Prim, an acquaintance of mine. Not a friend, 
but an acquaintance. Everybody calls her Miss 
Prim. You would no more think of saying 
Lucille than you would think of calling an ice- 
berg dearie. She listened in a bored way for 
a moment and then interrupted me. 

^^Why should you be so concerned about it?^' 
she asked. ^^He is nothing to you.'' 

'^But he is my friend," I replied. 

^^But suppose he is; you can't afford to 
bother yourself with other people's troubles." 

23 



24 POUR FEET ON A PENDER 

You may imagine that Miss Prim is only a 
thoughtless young thing who doesn't know half 
the time what she is saying. But it was not 
a thoughtless speech; as I found out after- 
wards, it was her philosophy of life. In the 
depths of her heart, or in whatever depths she 
has, she sincerely believes that one should mind 
one's own troubles as well as one's own busi- 
ness and let other people's alone. 

It is not altogether Miss Prim's fault. When 
she was a mere tot, her mother took her chil- 
dren across the water to educate them. They 
went to school a little while in England and 
a little while in France and a little while in 
Germany and several little whiles in divers and 
sundry places, and they never stayed long 
enough in one place to become interested in 
anybody but themselves. They saw people and 
they met people, but they never knew anybody. 
And when they came back to America, they 
lived a little while here and a little while there, 
and then they grew restless and packed up and 
went to Europe again. And they have been on 
the go ever since. If you should ask Miss Prim 
where she came from, she would say London 



BLOOD KIN TO EVERYBODY 25 

or Berlin or New York, as the mood took her; 
and if yon wanted to know her country, she 
would say: ^^Well, I suppose I should say 
America, of course, but really it makes no 
difference." 

And it really doesn't make any difference, 
for she has no more sense of patriotism in her 
soul than a pine cone. She is a woman with- 
out a country and without a people. 

Life has never been a problem to Miss Prim, 
for the simple reason that she does not live. 
She rises at a decent hour, eats three meals 
during the day, looks after her clothes, keeps 
a new book on hand, and occasionally a new bit 
of fancywork, takes long walks, shops, meets 
people, sees a new play, goes to bed at a de- 
cent hour, and sleeps well on what she calls 
a comfortable conscience. That, she tells me, 
is her strong point : she is sure no woman ever 
had a more comfortable conscience to sleep 
on. I don't think she has ever discovered her 
conscience: it's something else. But whatever 
it is she takes care of it. For she must be com- 
fortable: comfort is her existence. When she 
picks up the morning paper she holds her eyes 



26 FOUR FEET ON A FENDER 

fast to pleasant things and carefully avoids all 
headlines that might stir her sympathies. 
When she goes on the street she never sees a 
sign of poverty or suffering or need of any 
sort. She has trained herself so well that if 
some poor devil should fall dead at her feet she 
could make her way around him and go on as 
coolly as if he were a fallen post. And when it 
comes to conversation — ^well, no diplomat ever 
understood so well the art of evading a dis- 
agreeable subject. Whatever happens, she 
must avoid the disagreeable. The disagreeable 
is none of her affair and she must live her own 
life. Her sensibilities must not be disturbed. 

And as she never hears a cry of need, she 
never answers, and so nothing ever takes her 
out of her way. Nothing is to be done except 
what was done yesterday. If the recording 
angel writes up the deeds done in the body, 
there must be a very long white space beneath 
the name of Miss Lucille Prim, for I have never 
known her to do anything, either good or bad. 
She simply draws her monthly stipend and 
takes the days as they come. And of course 
she has not found life worth while ; she has sim- 



BLOOD KIN TO EVERYBODY 27 

ply found tliat it is not worth while not to 
exist. 

"What is the secret of this woman's failure? 
You have already guessed it : she has failed sim- 
ply for want of a sense of kinship. In her 
childhood her environment was such that she 
could hardly have been expected to discover her 
kinship with either God or humanity. She had 
a prayer book and went to church, but she re- 
mained as ignorant of both as a kitten. The 
idea that God was her Father never found its 
way into her mind. She never became con- 
scious of any tie binding her to God. She 
never became conscious of God. And she never 
laid her heart up against the great heart of 
humanity and heard them beat in unison and 
discovered that they were one. She thought of 
herself as a unit, complete in itself, with no 
cords running out from her heart except those 
which tied her to her mother, sisters and 
brothers, and she looked on the passing throng 
merely as a passing show. And so, never hav- 
ing discovered her kinship with humanity, she 
has never taken her place in the throng. She 
has never admitted, never even imagined, that 



28 FOUR FEET ON A FENDER 

she and the throng had anything in common. 
In all her life she has never recognized a human 
form lying in the dust as a brother or sister, 
nor has she ever heard anything in a cry of 
need from human lips that sounded like the 
voice of a kinsman. Nor has she ever thought 
of listening for the voice of the Father above. 
Having no sense of kinship, she has pursued her 
way in the world as one deaf and blind, and 
naturally she has never found her place in life, 
and therefore she has never found life worth 
while. 

You cannot live without a sense of kinship. 
Leave a man on an uninhabited island, and a 
day will not pass before he will realize that he 
must have something more than food to sus- 
tain life; he must have something that he can 
claim kinship with. And he will search every 
nook and corner of that island for that some- 
thing. If he can find nothing but a cold-blooded 
snake, he will find comfort in the snake. He 
will feed it and watch it for hours as it lies 
in the sand before his hut. He will talk to it 
and call it Jim. And the snake will become 
attached to him, and he will think of Jim al- 



{ 



BLOOD KIN TO EVERYBODY 29 

most as his cliild. If he can find nothing, and 
if he has no consciousness of the presence of 
the Unseen, he will throw up his hands, and 
you know what the end will be. And it will 
come quickly. 

Trying to live unto one's self turns one in- 
ward to live on one's self. It is like sucking 
one's own blood. . . . 

The fire has been full of beautiful visions 
for me to-day. I wish you could see the beauti- 
ful face that I saw a moment ago in those coals 
just over there. Ah ! there it is again. I have 
rarely seen such marvelous sweetness. It is 
the face of a woman who attained to a life of 
wonderful richness and beauty. I knew her 
years ago. She was not the kind of woman one 
usually thinks of when we speak of a beautiful 
soul — not a recluse, not an invalid who had 
become beautiful because her face had become 
so transparent that her glorious soul could not 
help shining through it. She lived in the world, 
just as you and I live in it. She had her place 
in the throng and she kept it. But the smell 
of the world was not on her garments. She 



30 FOUR FEET ON A FENDER 

had money, but her money had always found 
its way outward, never inward. It had never 
reached her soul ; it had never soiled her finger 
tips ; it was as if she had handled it all her life 
with rubber gloves. All the town bowed before 
her, but the worship of men, women, and little 
children was to her only as the love of her own 
family. It had never taken anything from her 
sweet simplicity, her beautiful humility, her 
transparent purity of soul. Her life was full, 
but never overcrowded. She was never too 
nervous to rest. She never pushed herself 
through crushes. She never joined in the 
world's mad pursuit. She never chased a fad, 
never went distracted over a new movement. 
She never spent a moment in that most desper- 
ate, most unreasonable, most agonizing of all 
womanly avocations — social climbing. She 
didn't have to, it is true, but she wouldn't have 
done it whatever her circumstances might have 
been. Her face was so serene and her ways so 
quiet that you would have wondered, if you had 
met her, whether she ever did anything that 
the world would count. Yet I do not think that 
I ever met her when her heart was not in a 



BLOOD KIN TO EVERYBODY 31 

flame. It was a steady flame, as steady as her 
soulful eyes that looked straight into yours 
and never flickered. And she always had some- 
thing to do that was worth while. There were 
the children of the mill to look after. There 
were fifty tots in her Sunday-school class that 
were ever on her heart. There were poor neigh- 
bors to feed. There were Bible women in 
heathen lands to take care of. There was a 
young man who had gone to drinking, and who 
needed an outstretched hand. There was a 
grief- stricken poor woman in the lane who 
needed comforting. There were fevered brows 
to be bathed; there were throbbing temples 
to be soothed; there were prodigals to be 
stopped in the way and led back to the Father. 

And she was always doing the things that 
needed to be done. 

She is doing them yet. I have not seen her 
in a long while, but I know she is doing them 
yet. If you should ask her to-day for the 
secret of her life, she could not tell you. But 
I can tell you, and I can tell you in a word. 
She has a sense of kinship as wide as the 
world. Her heart is tied to the Father and 



32 FOUR FEET ON A FENDER 

to all his children. She has never cut a cord 
that ties her to humanity. She feels that she 
is kin — really kin — blood kin — to every human 
being, and she knows she is kin to God. She 
has learned of him in his Word and talked with 
him in prayer and sat with her feet on the 
fender and looked into the fire and dreamed 
of him until she has become as conscious of 
the tie that binds her to him as she is of the 
tie that binds her to her husband. And be- 
cause her heart goes out toward the Father, she 
is always doing something that he wants done ; 
and because her heart goes out toward his chil- 
dren — because she feels that his children are 
her kin — her blood kin — she is always doing 
something for them. She is not trying to help 
the world to be better; she is only trying to 
help her kin. And that gives to her life a par- 
ticular meaning and a particular use. And that 
makes her life worth while to herself. 
And it makes it worth while to others. 



IV 



THE ART OF BEING A CHRISTIAN 

AND SO you too know what it means to be 
hungry for God. You know the loneli- 
ness and weariness and humiliation of wander- 
ing about in God's world as one of his nominal 
children and all the while realizing that you are 
hardly on speaking terms with him. You know 
what it is to start out in Christ's name and find 
no power to follow in his steps. And you know 

the emptiness ' 

No ; don't say that. Your life is not as empty 
as that. It cannot be as empty as that, for you 
are determined, and a determined woman's life 
you know is never empty. Only yesterday you 
were saying that you were tired of being a 
Christian in name only — ^tired of carrying 
Christ's flag and never winning a victory — and 
that you were resolved to be a real Christian 
if it cost you everything you had. Up to that 
point your life may indeed have been empty, but 

33 



34 FOUR FEET ON A FENDER 

the moment you determined to be a real Chris- 
tian it began to fill up. You may be sure of 
that. And, believe me, it is going to keep on 
filling up; for you are going to be the Chris- 
tian that you are determined to be. 

How do I know? Because in the life of the 
spirit we can all be just what we are deter- 
mined to be. 

Yes, I mean it. I am not seeing visions in 
the coals now : it is a plain matter of fact and 
as true as a sum in arithmetic. In the physical 
world we may determine and fail in spite of 
our strength ; but in the spiritual world we may 
determine and succeed in spite of our weak- 
ness. We can be just what we are determined 
to be. Mind you, I do not say that you are 
going to be what you would like to be; that 
is a very different matter. Only yesterday a 
friend of mine told me that all her life she 
had longed to be a Christian and she could 
never understand why she had made no prog- 
ress. It seemed to her that her earnest longing 
should have accomplished something. That is 
the trouble with many sincere people who are 
hanging around the threshold of the Christian 



THE ART OP BEING A CHRISTIAN 35 

life: they begin and end with longing. I once 
knew a woman who longed to be a Christian 
for seventy years and then died outside the 
threshold. Longing never takes yon a step up- 
ward. It may take you downward, but not 
upward. As Marie used to say — 

But I have never told you about Marie. An 
old friend of mine once said that Marie was 
the most charming volume of the evidences of 
Christianity he had ever read — and the most 
convincing. No man could look into her beau- 
tiful face and argue against Christ; he was 
there ; you could see him in her eyes. 

Marie used to say that the reason so many 
nominal Christians never become real Chris- 
tians is not that they don't long to be 
Christians, but that there is a high step be- 
tween longing and the threshold of the Chris- 
tian life — the step of determination — and the 
average man or woman seldom has the will to 
take it. God may fill us with longing to enter 
into the Christian life, but he is not going to 
take us up in his arms by force and carry us 
into it. He would no more try to force us into 
loving communion with himself than a mother 



36 FOUR FEET ON A FENDER 

would try to force her child into loving com- 
munion with herself. Forced communion is an 
absurdity. A child must step up to the 
threshold of his mother's heart of his own 
will. So if we would live the Christian life 
we must step up to the threshold of our own 
free will. That is what you did when you de- 
termined to be a real Christian regardless of 
the cost: you took the high step that brought 
you to the threshold. And now the way is clear 
before you. You do not need to wait for any- 
thing. You do not even need to wait for God. 
God has been waiting for you all these years 
and he is standing ready to go with you. You 
need not give yourself a moment's uneasiness 
about him : he will look after his part : you only 
need to be concerned about your part. Why 
not begin to do your part to-day ? If you want 

to learn the art of becoming a Christian 

Yes, I mean art, I know the word has an 
unorthodox sound, but that does not matter; 
sound is no test of orthodoxy any more than 
it is of piety. Of course being a Christian is 
something more than an art — infinitely more — 
but there is art in it. There is 



THE ART OF BEING A CHRISTIAN 37 

But I see you are knitting your brows again. 
You are thinking that I have contradicted my- 
self. Yes, I remember I was talking the other 
day about my beautiful spring and I said that 
it was the living image of a Christian ; and you 
would like to know if a beautiful spring, of all 
things, is not above all art. That depends. It 
may be true of springs in general, but it is not 
true of my spring in particular. If my spring 
was nothing but a fountain of water, certainly 
there would be no art in it; but if you should 
sit by it alone as I have done until the fountain 
disappeared and you saw in its place a calm, 
sweet face looking up into yours and seeking 
fellowship with your spirit, I think you would 
agree with me that it has at least mastered one 
art — the art of living. Did you ever know a 
man or woman who better understood how to 
keep the channels of the heart open to the 
stream of life, how to keep the spirit calm and 
sweet, how to keep the face upturned to 
heaven, how to look pleasant, how to be kind 
to everybody, how to give a cup of cold water 
in the name of Christ to friends and foes alike 
without spilling it on them? Yes, there is art 



38 FOUR FEET ON A FENDER 

even in being a Christian. No art can give us 
physical life, but if we want to live, really live, 
we must learn the art of living. So no art 
can give us spiritual life — Christ alone can 
give us that — but if we want to live, really live 
the Christian life, we must learn the art of 
Christian living. 

I know how you feel about it. I remember 
we were talking the other day about dear old 
Wilmer and you remarked that while you did 
not know him very well you had long envied him 
for his religion, which always seemed to you 
to run itself. But there are no automatic 
Christians any more than there are automatic 
artists, and if you should come to know my 
old friend as well as I do, you would find that 
he is as diligent in practicing the art of being 
a Christian as your musical neighbor is in prac- 
ticing on her piano. There is no life, how- 
ever simple it may be, that runs itself. If we 
are going to live, we must have a hand in our 
lives. It may be a very simple part, but we must 
do our part. I cannot paint my own portrait, 
but I must have a hand in it to the extent of 
sitting for it, and sitting for one's portrait, as 



THE ART OF BEING A CHRISTIAN 39 

every one wlio has tried it knows, is an art. 
So I cannot transform myself into the image 
of Christ, bnt I must have a hand in it to the 
extent of '^sitting" for the transformation, and 
this, as every one who has tried it — really tried 
it — ^knows, is an art — the simplest, it may be, 
yet the greatest of all the arts. 

Do I mean to put religion on a level with 
music or painting? No ; nevertheless, they have 
points of resemblance. For example, religion 
— the Christian religion — is like music or paint- 
ing in that, however hard you may work, you 
can never master the art unless you have some- 
thing in your soul. To be a musician you must 
have a musician in your soul, and to be a Chris- 
tian you must have Christ in your soul. But 
over against this resemblance you must note 
this great difference: if you want to master 
music you must have genius or talent to begin 
with, while if you want to learn the art of 
Christian living you only need tremendous ear- 
nestness to begin with. You may have enough 
earnestness to keep you practicing on your 
piano six hours a day — like your neighbor — 
and you may never become a pianist. No 



40 FOUR FEET ON A FENDER 

amount of earnestness can draw down from 
heaven the gift of genius. But if you are tre- 
mendously in earnest about being a Christian — 
in earnest enough to keep in earnest — ^you are 
going to be a Christian; for such earnestness 
is a prayer tugging ceaselessly at the heart of 
God. And such earnestness does draw down 
from heaven the gift of heavenly wisdom. And 
with this gift the most illiterate man or woman 
may learn the art of Christian living. I saw 
another face in the coals just then. It was the 
seamy old face of a cobbler I once knew. When 
that old man became a Christian he didn't know 
a letter of the alphabet, but before the week 
was over he was spelling his way through his 
Bible and in less than two years he became fa- 
mous as a refreshing fountain of heavenly wis- 
dom to which thirsty souls in the neighborhood 
were 'ever running for drink. I never knew a 
wiser counselor. It seems to me that the win- 
dows of heaven that were intended to open 
above the college nearby all opened just over 
the old cobbler's shop; at any rate, I knew 
more than one professor who always sneaked 
around to the little shop to have his shoes 



THE ART OF BEING A CHRISTIAN 41 

mended whenever he found himself in a fog 
over life's problems. God loves to pour down 
wisdom upon the heads of earnest people. . . . 

I wish we would learn to think of life as 
Jesus thought of it. When we talk about life 
we may mean any one of several different 
things. When Jesus talked about life he never 
meant but one thing. To his mind there was 
but one life — the life which we live when we 
live with God, the only true source of life. He 
never thought of men who existed only physi- 
cally and intellectually as being alive: men 
separated from God were separated from the 
source of life and were therefore dead. They 
might exist as animals, but they did not live 
as men. Life was too great a thing, too sa- 
cred a thing with him to be confounded with 
mere existence. Life was something going out 
from God into every channel of man's being — 
not only into the arteries and nerves of his 
body, but into all the channels of his soul. It 
was this life that Jesus came to impart to men 
and women, and it is the living of this life that 



42 FOUR FEET ON A FENDER 

constitutes his religion — ^the Christian religion. 
If this 

Yes, you have anticipated my point. If reli- 
gion is life, then the art of Christian living 
is simply the art of living, in the highest sense 
of the term. A Christian is not one who has 
given up life, not a peculiar being living a nar- 
row, one-sided life, but one who has opened up 
all the channels of his being to life and has be- 
come fully alive. A Christian woman does not 
have less life than other women, but more. She 
has not cut herself off from life; on the con- 
trary, she has come into vital union with the 
only true Source of Life, and life is ceaselessly 
pouring into her being, and she is every day 
becoming more and more alive and living a 
wider and fuller and more abundant life. 

But you want to know what constitutes the 
art of living in its highest sense. Let me see 
if I can make it plain. I know a young man who 
has mastered the art of physical living. And, 
by the way, he is a magnificent looking fellow. 
I have rarely seen such a splendid bundle of 
physical life. What has he been doing? He 
has not tried to produce life — nobody outside 



'A. 



THE ART OP BEING A CHRISTIAN 43 

of a laboratory ever attempted that sort of 
thing; — ^he has simply aimed to open np every 
part of his body to life. All that he has done 
for his body has been with a view to giving life 
a full chance in every muscle, every artery, 
every nerve, every pore, every particle of his 
physical being. That is the meaning of all his 
exercises, his baths, his dieting, his tests — 
everything. The art of physical living con- 
sists in doing certain things to keep every part 
of the physical being open to life — to give life 
a full chance in the body. The art of intel- 
lectual living, as you know, is of the same char- 
acter. You have mastered that art, and every- 
thing you do for your mind is with a view to 
opening up your intellectual being more and 
more fully to life. Now the art of living in 
the highest sense consists primarily in doing for 
the higher or spiritual nature what you are 
accustomed to do for your mind and what that 
young man has been doing for his body : its aim 
is to open up every part of the spiritual being 
to life — to the Spirit of Christ who is our life. 

But my young friend has discovered that his 
body and mind are so intimately connected that 



44 POUR FEET ON A PENDER 

one affects the other, and so he not only keeps 
his body open to Ufe, but he tries to keep his 
mind open to life also, that the health and vigor 
of the one may add to the health and vigor of 
the other. And you have made the same dis- 
covery and you insist that if life is to have a 
full chance in your mind you must give it a 
full chance in your body also. So the Chris- 
tian has discovered that the body and mind 
are intimately connected with the soul, and 
while he is interested primarily in his spiritual 
nature he realizes that he must not only do what 
he can to keep his spiritual nature open to 
Christ, but he must keep his body and mind at 
his disposal also. Thus the art of Christian 
living — that is, living in the highest, fullest 
sense — consists in handling ourselves in such 
a way that Christ, our life, may have a full 
chance in every part of our being. 

But how should one begin to learn the art 
of Christian living? Suppose you should ask 
a bird how he learned to sing — ^what do you 
think he would say? I think he would say: 
^ ' The best way to begin is to begin. That was 



THE ART OF BEING A CHRISTIAN 45 

my way. ' ' I am sure he would say it, for that 
is the way everybody begins who does any- 
thing worth while — that is, everybody except 
people. What queer creatures we humans are ! 
A little bird just plunges in anywhere and soon 
beats us singing. A little ant just takes hold 
anywhere and soon beats us working. But we 
humans — we spend so much time trying to de- 
cide how to begin that there is no time left to 
begin. Why can't we just begin? Why not be- 
gin the art of Christian living by just begin- 
ning? 

Is that all? No; but our fire is getting low 
and it is time to light the lamps. 



GIVING CHEIST A CHANCE IN OUR LIVES 

WHEN I asked why we cannot begin the 
art of Christian living by just begin- 
ning, just as a bird begins to learn to sing sim- 
ply by beginning, I only meant to say that the 
right way to make a beginning in the Christian 
life is the way we make a beginning in any- 
thing else, and that is the natural way. To 
Jesus the spiritual was as natural as the mate- 
rial. His Heavenly Father was as natural as 
his earthly mother and religion was as natural 
as breathing. And if we want to be drawn to 
the things of the spirit we must learn to think 
of them in the same way. We must think of 
the land of the spirit not as a far-off ghostly 
land, but as a real, though invisible, land in 
which we may walk here and now just as we 
walk in the sweet fields in the cool of the eve- 
ning. The spiritual life is not a mysterious 
unhuTnaxi existence ; it is not something diff er- 

46 



GIVING CHRIST A CHANCE 47 

ent from life; it is the perfection of life. A 
Christian woman is not an eccentric exile from 
humanity, as so many people imagine; she is 
simply a normal woman who has opened up her 
whole being to the Eternal Fountain of Life and 
is living life at its full. 

How wonderfully this idea of the natural- 
ness of the Christian life smooths the way for 
us when we turn our backs upon nominal Chris- 
tianity and start out to be Christians indeed! 
The woman who imagines that if she wants to 
be a real Christian she must cut out her life 
after a mysterious pattern never succeeds in 
cutting out her life at all. She doesn't know 
her pattern and she can make nothing but blun- 
ders. And what pitiful blunders they are! 
Now you can steer clear of these blunders, and 
you will steer clear of them if you will only 
remember that the life which you are to live 
is not an imitation life or an artificial life, but 
the life of Christ. If you will put yourself 
in Christ's hands that he may live in you, and 
if you will follow the promptings of his Spirit, 
you will find yourself living as simply and natu- 
rally as he lived. 



48 POUR FEET ON A PENDER 

Nature is not a criminal; she is God's child, 
and we mnst not imagine that the more unnatu- 
ral we make our religious life the more Christ- 
like we will be. On the contrary, we must 
conform to nature more. Not to sin, not to 
our sinful natures, but to nature — to nature as 
it comes from the hand of God. The hypocriti- 
cal rabbis were unnatural. They make you 
think of horribly deformed children. Jesus was 
natural. He makes you think of the lilies of 
the field. . . . 

Ah ! you did not get that last sentence. Well, 
no matter; doubtless you were thinking of 
something better. What? Listening to the 
silence? Well, that is better. I am glad you 
have an ear for the silence: it is wonderful 
music. Some people know only the stillness 
that is as a vacuum. But this is the silence 
of life — ^the silence that is not empty, but full. 
And this silence of life is all so natural — as 
natural as the breathing of a babe. It seems 
to me everything in the world breathes natu- 
rally except our souls. Our souls don't know 



GIVING CHRIST A CHANCE 49 

how to breathe. They struggle on as if they 
were being smothered. 

What is the matter? Why don't our souls 
breathe naturally? Is it because God has put 
them where there is little for them to breathe, 
or is it only because we don't treat them natu- 
rally? Is it because we are always smother- 
ing them? What are we doing with these wet 
blankets? Why don't we give our souls a 
chance? Why don't we make use of common 
sense in religion? When we start out to learn 
the art of Christian living, why do we avoid 
nature and try to see how unnatural we 
can be? 

We must give our souls a chance. If we want 
to live the Christ life we must live as Christ 
lived. We must live naturally. We must live 
reasonably. We must be governed by our God- 
given common sense. We must honor the laws 
of God in our spiritual life as we honor them 
in our physical life. In other words, we must 
get rid of our inherited heathen notion that 
the religious man is an unnatural man, and 
we must learn the truth at the feet of Jesus. 



50 FOUR FEET ON A FENDER 

We must take our life lessons at the feet of 
Jesus. . . • 

Yes, I understand. You hesitate to make a 
beginning because you have not yet made the 
Great Surrender. But you must not wait for 
that. You cannot do that except under a great 
impulse — the impulse of a great vision. Now 
don't misunderstand me. I am not a visionary. 
But you know there are visions and visions. 
There is 

How wonderfully the faces keep coming up 
in the fire ! Just then I saw the eyes of a young 
woman who, when I first knew her, was noth- 
ing more than a pretty bundle of selfishness. 
I have seldom seen a more abject slave to self. 
One day she looked into the face of her new- 
born babe and something happened. Some- 
thing does not always happen. Sometimes a 
mother looks into the face of her first baby 
and sees nothing but a little bundle of pink 
flesh ; and then nothing happens. But this girl 
saw a vision. She saw her boy! The pano- 
rama of his life passed before her and she saw 
him as he turned now and then to look at her 



GIVING CHRIST A CHANCE 51 

— ^now with laughing eyes and now in tears; 
now her Cherub with golden curls ; now her Lit- 
tle Boy Blue; now her Little Man in his first 
long pants; now her Heart's Hope going off 
to college. And then, as I have said, something 
happened. The chain which all her life had 
bound her ambition to Self snapped and in- 
stantly her ambition went out to her boy. From 
that moment she was ambitious only for her 
boy; and she never gave Self another thought. 
That is the kind of vision you must have 
before you are going to transfer your al- 
legiance from Self to Christ. Often you have 
dropped upon your knees and tried to make 
the surrender. But nothing has happened. 
And often you have wondered why. But how 
could anything happen? If you are not sure 
about Grod, if you don't realize him, if he is 
only like a man's name you saw in a book, if 
you are simply assuming that he exists, how can 
you surrender yourself to him? You cannot 
give yourself to one of whom you are not sure. 
You are not going to surrender to a name, 
a memory, a character in a book, a shadow, a 
creation of the imagination, a deity of the past ; 



52 FOUR FEET ON A FENDER 

you will only surrender to a real, living Being. 
And you will not surrender to Mm until lie 
comes and speaks to you. You are not going 
to put your life into the hands of any being 
until you have looked into his face. But one 
day — perhaps while you are reading your 
Bible, or while you are walking in the fields in 
the cool of the evening, or while you are look- 
ing into the face of death, or while your heart 
is aching over your sins or over the miseries of 
your f ellowmen — one day when you are hungry 
for God there will come to you a vision of God. 
That is, God will come into your consciousness. 
In some way he will make himself real to you 
— as real as Christ made himself to Paul on 
the way to Damascus. The truth may strike 
into your mind like a flash of lightning or it 
may dawn upon you slowly like the coming of 
a new day; but it will come. And in that mo- 
ment you will look upon him with the eyes of 
your soul and you will discover that he is your 
Father and Savior and Lord and Friend and 
that he has come to you because he loves you. 
And then something will happen. Your heart 
will go out to him with infinite yearning and 



GIVING CHRIST A CHANCE 53 

you will rise and take up everything that you 
have laid at the feet of Self and lay it down 
at your Father's feet to be his forever. 

But until then, what? Is there nothing for 
you to do but sit down and wait for him to 
show himself to you? 

A dear companion of my dream-life said to 
me one day: '^My boy, when you were a child 
you played building houses in the backyard, 
didn't you? Yes, I am sure you did. And one 
day you got together a lot of goods-boxes and 
piled them up around you until they were above 
your head, and you sat down and for a mo- 
ment you were happy. And you looked up and 
saw the blue sky and then you jumped up and 
ran out and got some boards and shut out the 
blue sky. And then you chinked up the cracks 
so that you couldn't hear your father when he 
called you. And then you went back and sat 
down again. And you were as proud as Nebu- 
chadnezzar because you had succeeded in shut- 
ting out God's blue sky and your father's voice. 
Now, my boy, your trouble is just this : you are 
still playing in the backyard. Ever since you 
have been out in life you have been piling up 



54 FOUR FEET ON A FENDER 

things around you and you have piled them up 
until you can no longer see the blue sky above 
you or hear your Father's voice. No wonder 
God does not answer your prayer and reveal 
himself to you. Do you know what he would do 
if he should answer it? He would do just as 
your good old father did when he came home 
that day and called you half a dozen times and 
you did not answer. He would walk out into 
the backyard and the first thing you knew all 
your precious goods-boxes would go tumbling 
down with a crash and he would take you by 
the ear and lead you out from amid the ruins, 
a poorer but a wiser man, sir.'' 

Does not this suggest an answer to your 
question? While waiting for God to show him- 
self to you should you not try to clear away 
the obstacles which you have piled up between 
yourself and him ? Should you not give Christ 
a chance to come into your life? What about 
all these self-imposed, so-called duties and dis- 
tracting pursuits which we have wedged into 
all our waking moments until there is no longer 
a quiet corner in the day where we can sit 
down and think of God? What about all the 



GIVING CHRIST A CHANCE 55 

unreasonable social demands which have piled 
up a mountain of folly between our eyes and 
God? And if the cares of this world and the 
deceitfulness of riches have shut us in and 
bound us about so tightly that we haven't 
strength to cast them down, should we not at 
least make a few peepholes here and there in 
the way of occasional moments set apart for 
quiet thinking and praying, so that we can catch 
a glimpse of the blue sky now and then and 
so that the still small voice will have a chance 
to filter through into our hearts? 

One day this same dear old counselor said 
to me: ^'Were you ever thrown with a bright, 
earnest boy who had just settled upon what he 
was going to be in life? It's a privilege, my 
son, a privilege. If you will watch a boy of 
that sort you will learn something. For one 
thing he will teach you how to wait. Think 
of a boy teaching you how to wait! But he 
will. If you want to know what you should 
do while waiting on God, watch that tremen- 
dously earnest youngster who has decided that 
he is going to be — say, an electrician. How 
does he act? Does he sit down and write in 



56 FOUR FEET ON A FENDER 

his diary that he is going to be an electrician, 
and then say to himself, ^That^s settled; when 
I get my education and father arranges things 
for me I'll begin'? Bless your soul, no. Can 
you imagine a live boy doing that? Does a boy 
who is on fire to be an electrician postpone the 
matter until he has completed his education 
and his father has arranged things for him? 
Not for a moment. Not for a single moment, 
sir. The very instant he decides to be an elec- 
trician he begins to think electricity, dream 
electricity, talk electricity. In an hour he is 
so full of electricity that you are almost afraid 
to touch him. Then he disappears and an hour 
later he comes back with an armful of old 
electrical magazines and two or three dry bat- 
teries. Then you lose sight of him again and 
when you go to look for him you find him in 
his little shop in the backyard all tangled up 
in a maze of wires and batteries and dynamos 
and spark coils and everything else electrical 
that he has been able to buy, beg or borrow. 
In other words, the boy, having decided to be 
an electrician, waits for the day when he can 
become a real electrician, not by putting the 



( 



GIVING CHRIST A CHANCE 57 

matter aside until the time comes, but by begin- 
ning at once to act as an electrician to the best 
of his knowledge and ability. And there is the 
answer to your question, sir." 

I do not know a better answer. The way to 
wait for God to give you a vision that will bring 
you to his feet and make you the victorious 
Christian that you want to be is to begin at 
once to act as a real Christian to the best of 
your knowledge and ability. Do you know 

Yes, I see your point. You think that the 
boy is merely playing at being an electrician 
and accomplishing nothing and you can see no 
reason why you should follow his example. I 
said the same thing to my dear old friend ; but 
I was wrong and so are you. The boy is not 
playing at being an electrician and he is accom- 
plishing something. In your eyes and mine he 
is only playing, but in his own eyes he is work- 
ing — working with all his might. And he is 
accomplishing something. He does not know 
it, but his earnest efforts, awkward and inade- 
quate as they may be, are bringing about a state 
of mind or an attitude that will wonderfully 
open up the way toward the thing he is de- 



58 POUR FEET ON A FENDER 

termined to master ; moreover, they are gradu- 
ally enlarging his capacity for it, and we know 
perfectly well that if his earnestness has stay- 
ing qualities the time is coming when he is 
going to be a real electrician. And so it will be 
with you if you will to-day begin to act as a 
Christian to the full extent of your knowledge 
and ability. You may act very poorly, you 
may not be a real Christian any more than that 
boy is a real electrician, but you will not be 
merely playing at being a Christian and you 
will accomplish something: you will be doing 
your best and you will be bringing about a 
state of mind or an attitude that will give Christ 
a chance in your life and will wonderfully open 
up the way toward the goal upon which you 
have set your heart. 



VI 



BEGIl^lSriNG THE DAY WITH GOD 

NOW let me see if I can illustrate what I 
mean by the art of being a Christian. 
Let us take the first hour in the morning — the 
hour that takes more grace and more art to 
be a real Christian perhaps than any other hour 
of the day. A man is like a locomotive in that, 
however big and powerful he may be, he is 
not ready to start on the day's run until he 
has been especially equipped for it. And a 
woman — well, one doesn't like to think of a 
woman as a locomotive; but she is just like a 
man. What we sometimes call woman's natu- 
ral piety will no more carry a woman through 
the day without special equipment than it would 
carry a man through it if he had it. Like a 
man she needs a lot of fire and steam, a lot 
of fuel, and no end of oiling and rubbing; 
and the longer and harder the journey, the 
more fire and steam and fuel and oiling and 

59 



60 FOUR FEET ON A FENDER 

rubbing she must have. We learned this when 
we were mastering the art of living, and it 
has saved us many costly mistakes. We look 
with pity upon the woman who, when she has 
a hard day before her, jumps out of bed and 
runs downstairs to her work as if she were 
going to a fire. We would not be guilty of 
such idiocy. We have learned that what we 
get out of a day depends largely upon what 
we put into it at the start ; and instead of tak- 
ing the fact that we have a hard day before us 
as a reason why we should hurry, we take it 
as an all-important reason why we should not 
hurry. If there is not much before us to-day, 
we may give way to our natural indolence and 
slur over our morning preparations ; but if we 
have a task before us that will require the best 
that is in us, we are going to put ourselves 
in the very ^^pink of condition" for it. You 
women will force yourselves to rise leisurely; 
you will make your toilet quietly and thor- 
oughly, and you will not go downstairs until 
you have done everything you can to bring both 
body and mind to the highest state of efficiency 
of which they are capable. We men will take 



BEGINNING THE DAY WITH GOD 61 

a little more time for our bath, our rubbing 
down, our ' ' limbering-up ' ' exercises, our break- 
fast, our walk downtown — all with a view to 
reaching the office equipped for our task like 
a great, shining, pulsating locomotive starting 
out on its morning run. In a word, before we 
begin the life of the day we are going to do 
everything in our power for our bodies and 
minds, that they may have all the life they are 
going to need for the day. 

And all this we are going to do because we 
have mastered the art of living. 

And yet this morning — or perhaps it was yes- 
terday morning — ^when a certain good woman 
I know woke up and suddenly remembered that 
she had a hard day before her in her Christian 
life, — that there were heavy burdens to bear 
and strong temptations to face and great vic- 
tories to be won, — she jumped out of bed and 
plunged into the day without taking so much 
as a single moment to give her soul a bath, or 
a rub down, or a limbering-up exercise, or a 
breakfast, or to prepare it in any way whatever 
to meet the severe demands which she knew 



62 FOUR FEET ON A FENDER 

would be made upon its strength in the course 
of the day. 

I do not know anything which the average 
Christian needs to learn so much as the art of 
equipping the soul for the day's task. It is 
not a difficult art, not more difficult than that 
of equipping the body or mind; and if it were 
not for the fact that the average Christian is, 
for some mysterious reason, religiously op^ 
posed to the use of common sense in religion, 
no doubt we should all have mastered it long 
ago. 

In preparing our bodies and minds for the 
day our aim is to place them at the disposal of 
life. We know that if our lives are to be worth 
while we must have an abundance of life. Life 
must take full possession of us, that every part 
of our being may be fully alive. This is the 
meaning of all our early morning activities — 
our stretching, our deep breathing, our bathing, 
our rubbing down, our sane eating, our meth- 
ods of getting our minds wide awake and well 
in hand. We do these things that every part of 
our physical and intellectual being may have 
life, and may have it abundantly. 



BEGINNING THE DAY WITH GOD 63 

In getting the soul ready for the day the aim 
is the same. Christ came that we might have 
life, and that we might have it abundantly. If 
we want to live a victorious life to-day, we 
must live the Christ life; and if we want to 
live the Christ life, we must see to it at the 
very beginning of the day that every part of 
our being is opened up to him and placed at 
his disposal. This means something more than 
simply making a speech of surrender to Christ, 
as we are so often content to do. It means the 
actual opening of our souls to Christ; and as 
our bodies and minds are important roads lead- 
ing to the soul, it means giving Christ control 
of our bodies and minds also. 

The first step in equipping the soul for the 
day is to turn the waking thoughts Godward. 
Experience as well as psychology has taught 
us that the direction our thoughts take at the 
beginning of the day usually determines their 
tendency for the rest of the day. If our first 
thoughts turn toward our worries or our self- 
ish interests, we shall find ourselves continu- 
ally tempted to think of our worries or our 
selfish interests throughout the day. If we be- 



64 FOUR FEET ON A FENDER 

gin by thinking of pleasure, we shall have a 
hard time later on trying to force ourselves 
to think of our work. If we indulge in thoughts 
of ease, we are not likely to appreciate, for 
that day at least, the glory of enduring hard- 
ness as a good soldier of Jesus Christ. On the 
other hand, if we begin the day with thoughts 
of God — if we think of him until we realize 
him, until we become conscious of his presence 
— ^we shall go forth to the day's task with a 
strong upward tendency in thought and feel- 
ing, and the chances are that this upward tend- 
ency will continue through the day and that we 
shall end the day as we began it — ^with God. . . . 

Yes, that is true. It is a great deal easier 
to talk about controlling one 's waking thoughts 
than to control them. You would have no diffi- 
culty in sending your last thoughts at night 
toward God ; you could put that down on your 
day's schedule if necessary. But how are you 
going to determine the direction of your wak- 
ing thoughts when they usually start off before 
you are sufficiently awake to give them direc- 
tion? 



BEGINNING THE DAY WITH GOD 65 

Here is another simple fact of psychology 
worth remembering: If you are deeply inter- 
ested in a matter when you go to bed at night 
and dismiss it just before going to sleep, with 
the determination to take it up again the first 
thing in the morning, it will hang around you, 
so to speak, throughout the night, and when you 
wake up in the morning you will find it wait- 
ing for you. You have often taken advantage 
of this fact in a matter of work or pleasure; 
you can just as easily take advantage of it in 
the matter of religion. If you will spend a little 
while thinking of God before you go to sleep — 
that is, if you will think of him in an inter- 
ested way as you would think of your plans 
for to-morrow, and will go to sleep with the 
desire and determination to think of him the 
first thing in the morning — you will not only 
find it easy to think of God as soon as you 
awake, but you will very likely find him in your 
mind at the moment of waking. 

But it is not enough to turn the waking 
thoughts Godward; one must turn the waking 
heart Godward also. This is the second step. 
A Christian must begin the day like a lark ; he 



66 POUR FEET ON A FENDER 

must wing his way heavenward with a song. 
This is not merely a joyful privilege; it is a 
necessity. It is a necessity because, if you are 
going to be a real Christian during the day, 
if you are going to live the victorious life, you 
must mount at once to the heights of faith, of 
perfect trust; and if you want to reach the 
heights at once, you must mount with a song in 
your heart. This, of course, means that when 
you begin to think of God you must think the 
thoughts that will warm your heart and fill it 
with yearning toward him. Thinking of God 
does not necessarily warm the heart ; you must 
think of him in heart-warming ways. If you 
will think of him as a loved one, if you will 
think of some of the many ways in which he 
has shown his love for you, your heart will be- 
gin to warm toward him, and soon it will be 
winging its way toward him with a song. You 
will praise his name. You may not sing with 
your lips, but you will sing with your heart; 
and when your heart mounts toward God with 
a song, it will leave the shadows. It will rise 
above all doubts and fears. It will not stop 
short of the very pinnacle of perfect trust. 



BEGINNING THE DAY WITH GOD 67 

What a glorious privilege it is to begin the day 
at such a height! 

There are many little means of helping the 
heart in its upward flight which are greatly 
valued by those who have long practiced the 
art of beginning the day with God. One is 
to keep on a little table by the bed a Bible in 
which the most precious promises have been 
marked and to read two or three of these prom- 
ises before rising. Another is to keep one^s 
hymn book on the little table also, and to read 
a bit of a glad hymn here and there. Of course 
you will remember that you have placed your 
body and mind, as well as your soul, at Christ's 
disposal, and you will do everything you can 
to make them serve him rather than hinder 
him in his work for your soul. For instance, 
if your spirits are depressed, you will not neg- 
lect to peep through the blinds while you are 
dressing, that you may refresh your heart with 
a glimpse of the morning — God's morning; and 
if the day is dark, you will not forget to make 
a bright light in the room and to hum a bit of 
a joyful tune. All through one's physical prep- 
arations for the day, whether the morning is 



68 POUR FEET ON A PENDER 

dark or bright, the heart should continually be 
going out toward God in song or prayer — lit- 
tle heart melodies and little heart ejaculations, 
especially ejaculatory prayers of consecration. 

There are other little helps which will sug- 
gest themselves as you go along. The impor- 
tant thing to remember is that you have a body 
and mind as well as a soul and that if you do 
not place your body and mind at Christ's dis- 
posal, instead of helping the soul they will be 
as millstones about its neck. Let your body and 
mind have their way and they will get in the 
way of your soul; put them at Christ's disposal 
and they will help your soul on its way. 

Now suppose you have begun the day by tak- 
ing these two steps. You have turned your 
waking mind toward God and you have turned 
your waking heart toward him. You are stand- 
ing at your mirror completing your toilet and 
humming a little tune — a little hymn of praise 
— and your body and mind and heart are all 
in a glow. Suddenly it flashes upon you that 
you have a hard day before you. You have 
got to attempt some things you have never at- 
tempted before and they are going to take all 



BEGINNING THE DAY WITH GOD 69 

the strength you have — and more. What will 
you do about it? Your first impulse is to drop 
everything and run downstairs. But you have 
learned the art of living — rather of physical 
and mental living — and you curb your impulse. 
But what will you do? There is no time for 
your breakfast, but, time or no time, you are 
not going to plunge into the day's work with 
an unequipped body. That is settled. But you 
have learned that your greatest struggles on 
a hard day are never physical but spiritual, 
and reason tells you that it is far more impor- 
tant for you to go to your day's task with a 
strong, well-equipped soul than it is to go with 
a strong, well-equipped body. What will you 
do? Will you take the time that is necessary 
to equip your body and leave off the equipment 
of your soul until the day's struggles are over? 
If the greatest battles of the day are to be 
fought by the spirit, should you not put the 
equipment of your spirit foremost? 

I wish I could tell you how deeply I feel 
about this matter. The secret of a strong 
Christian is in his closet and you will find it 
there early in the morning. You may have to 



70 FOUR FEET ON A FENDER 

postpone your quiet half -hour until after break- 
fast, but don't forget that the world has never 
known a great Christian who did not set great 
store by his morning half -hour with God. Men 
who win battles don't rush into the battlefield 
unequipped. It is folly to hope that you can 
spend the day with God if you are not will- 
ing to begin it with him. It is an insult to God 
to plunge into the day's work depending upon 
him to go with you and supply your needs on 
your flippant promise to recognize him with a 
bedside prayer when the day is over. 

We are making a great ado nowadays about 
hungry mouths and full dinner-pails and I am 
glad. I am glad that our eyes are at last open 
to a vision of the world's physical hunger. 
But let us not forget that for every man who 
is faint for want of a dinner there are a hun- 
dred men falling by the way for want of food 
for their souls. The streets are full of faint- 
ing souls and we never see them — ^we are so 
busy looking for men with empty dinner-pails. 
And there are so many good, well-meaning peo- 
ple among them, too — ^people who want to win 
great spiritual victories but who know no bet- 



BEGINNING THE DAY WITH GOD 71 

ter than to risk their souls in the day's battle 
without feeding them on so much as a mouth- 
ful of the Word of God and without giving them 
a chance to snatch a single full breath of the 
air of heaven. 



vn 



SOUL FEEDING 

READING one's Bible should be as natu- 
ral as eating. It is eating. I remem- 
ber 

Ah ! There 's another vision in the coals. It 
is a beautiful thrush — ^the brown thrasher kind. 
I came upon it one day last summer in the 
mountains. It had just found a big juicy worm 
and it was making the most of it. There's 
something strangely fascinating about the way 
a bird handles its dinner problem. He goes at 
it so naturally and with such wonderful faith. 
He never handicaps himself with artificial ways 
— like humans. If I had been in that little 

thrasher's place I should have laid off a square 
rod of land and proceeded to work it over 

anxiously inch by inch from left to right and 

from right to left. But he knew better. He 

went direct to the spot where he knew juicy 

worms were most likely to be found. And he 

72 



SOUL FEEDING 73 

found what he was looking for. And when he 
found it he ate it regardless of etiquette. Why 
should a bird care for etiquette? He doesn't 
have to be unnatural. He doesn't have to eat 
by the book. He doesn't have to swallow one- 
sixteenth of his worm now and another six- 
teenth to-morrow and so on for sixteen suc- 
cessive days. And he won't. He hates rules 
and artificialities and forms and he is going 
to be natural or nothing. I like that. I haven't 
the courage, I confess, to follow his example at 
my own table, and perhaps it is well that I 
haven't: etiquette is more comfortable; but 
when it comes to giving the soul its breakfast 
I hope I shall always be brave enough to be 
natural. 

For there is nothing that dries up one's de- 
votional hours so completely as artificiality in 
one's Bible reading. Whatever you do, don't 
lay off a square of the Word of God and work 
it through verse by verse at the rate of so 
many verses a day. Don't adopt a hard-and- 
fast plan of Bible study and devote so many 
minutes to it by your watch. Unless one has 
a good deal of time on one's hands, I am not 



74 POUR FEET ON A PENDER 

sure that one should attempt any Bible study 
in the early morning at all. In any event, one 
should not begin with study: one should begin 
with devotional reading. 

Devotional reading is prayerful — sprayer- 
filled — reading and if you would read devotion- 
ally you must choose passages that make you 
feel like praying. Some passages make you 
feel like analyzing them. You want to put them 
under the microscope. But this is laboratory 
work, and you don't want to begin the day 
in the laboratory. What you want now is food. 

There is my little brown thrasher again. By 
the way, did you ever notice a bird when he 
first wakes up in the morning? A bird, you 
know, has a very high temperature. It is so 
high that his food digests with great rapidity, 
and however full he may be, when he goes to 
sleep he wakes up empty and faint and he is 
in no condition for anything until he can get 
something to eat. That is the way with our 
souls: I don't know why, but for some reason 
our souls usually wake up in the morning empty 
and faint. There is more truth than humor in 
the familiar saying that the average man is 



SOUL FEEDING 75 

a heathen until he gets his breakfast. The 
world long ago noticed how easy it was to go 
wrong early in the morning and laid it to 
nerves. But nerves don't deserve half the 
blame that is laid upon them. It is true that 
when we awake our bodies are usually let down, 
but one doesn't usually act like a heathen sim- 
ply because his body is let down; usually the 
trouble is with his let-down soul. We may call 
it nerves, but when it is all over an honest 
Christian will admit that his nerves might not 
have acted so badly if he had not neglected to 
feed his soul. 

But I have wandered from my point. In 
reading the Bible devotionally one should fol- 
low the example of my little brown thrasher 
and go direct to the places where one is likely 
to find the food one needs. Nature has marked 
the places quite plainly for the birds, and God's 
saints have marked the places quite plainly for 
us. If you will examine the Bible of a mature 
man or woman who has fathomed the depths 
of Christian experience, you will find perhaps 
three-fourths of the thumb-marks in the gospels 
and the Psalms. You may find them quite thick 



76 FOUR FEET ON A FENDER 

at a few points in the prophets and epistles, but 
you will usually find them thickest of all among 
the words of Jesus. The thumb-marks in the 
Bible of a victorious Christian are pretty safe 
for a hungry soul to follow, though of course 
you should not follow them without regard to 
your individual tastes and needs. You will find 
it a good plan to mark all the passages of a 
devotional nature as you come upon them so 
that when you begin your devotional reading 
you can turn to them without delay. And re- 
member, the passages you will want are those 
in which you can hear God talking to you and 
which will often move you to talk to God. 

In learning the art of physical living you 
have discovered that even in so simple a mat- 
ter as eating one's breakfast much depends 
upon what you do to give your food a fair 
chance. You have found that it is not enough 
to select the right sort of food: you must eat 
properly and under circumstances that will en- 
courage digestion. You know that you cannot 
afford to eat alone or hurriedly or in a gloomy 
room. If the morning is dark you will turn 
up the lights and you will make an extra effort 



SOUL FEEDING 77 

to be cheerful. You will be careful about the 
little things the average woman overlooks. You 
will even insist upon sitting in the same place, 
and in the same chair, for you have found that 
when you sit in a different place your body and 
mind are slow to adjust themselves to it and 
there is a certain nervous disturbance which, to 
say the least, does not do you any good. 

Now what is true of the body in this matter, 
as in so many others, is just as true of the soul. 
If you want to make the most of your spiritual 
breakfast you must make use of your common 
sense and do what you can to give your food a 
fair chance. It is not enough to select proper 
food. The fact that it is the Word of God 
that you are going to read is no reason why 
you should imagine that it is going to nourish' 
you regardless of the way in which you may 
read it. God does not work miracles to make 
up for our carelessness in the land of the spirit 
any more than he does to make up for our 
carelessness in the land of matter. We must 
do our part. We must make use of what he 
has given us. When you eat your breakfast you 
don't allow your mind to handicap your body; 



78 FOUR FEET ON A FENDER 

you try to make it help your body. So in feed- 
ing upon God's Word you must not allow your 
mind and body to handicap your soul: you 
must try to make them help your soul. 

Many good people make a failure of their 
morning devotions because they allow their 
bodies and minds to handicap them when they 
might make them serve them. If you sit down 
just anywhere and undertake to read your Bible 
it will take several minutes of your half -hour 
to adjust yourself to your surroundings If 
you try to read where the light is bad and where 
you are likely to be interrupted you are not 
likely to get yourself adjusted at all. On the 
other hand, if you will set apart a quiet spot — a 
room, if possible — to be kept sacred to this one 
purpose and always go to the same spot and sit 
in the same chair under the same bright light 
and use the same Bible, you will soon find that 
your surroundings have not only ceased to be 
a hindrance but have become a positive and 
important help. You know how it works in 
other matters. You know that if you should 
spend half an hour a day for a month reading 
Browning in the big leather chair in the library 



SOUL FEEDING 79 

you would produce a Browning atmosphere 
around that chair that would tempt you to read 
Browning every time you sat in it. So if you 
will carry your Bible every day at the same 
hour to the same quiet spot, you will find that 
the Word of God will open up to you in the 
sacred stillness like flowers opening up to the 
morning sun. If a woman has a single spot 
in her home that she can call her own — I am 
well aware that there are many who haven't — 
she cannot do better than set it apart for her 
morning meeting-place with God. 

And as one should always go to the same 
spot, so one should always take the same Bible 
— a Bible that one has read until it comes natu- 
rally to one's hand. Of course one should see 
to it that the print is large, for large print 
is like a loud, emphatic voice that wakes you 
up, while small print is like a feeble, drowsy lit- 
tle voice that puts you to sleep. How many 
devotional hours have become a bore and a drag 
and finally ceased to be for no other reason 
than the somnific effect of unreadable type ! 

If it is important to avoid hurry in eating 



80 FOUR FEET ON A FENDER 

one's breakfast, it is far more important to 
avoid it in feeding the soul. Hurry is as deadly 
an enemy to devotion as sin. You simply can- 
not get into a devotional frame if you have got 
to watch the clock. Everything depends upon 
realizing God, and to realize God one must be 
quiet. ^'Be still and know that I am God." 
This is the first thing a wise woman does when 
she takes her Bible and sits down to spend her 
morning half -hour with God. To realize God 
one must be still. It is not a matter of get- 
ting God to come to us. He is already with us. 
It is not a matter of getting him to speak to 
us. He is already speaking to us. What we 
have got to do is to be still so that we can 
hear. It is a still small voice and he does 
not raise it. We must be still. It is not enough 
to go off to the quietest spot we can find. I 
have gone to my beautiful spring in the wood 
and sat down in the cool stillness and listened' 
in vain for his voice. I have sat here before 
the fire in the still twilight of a winter evening 
and strained my ears in vain for the faintest 
whisper of his love. There was too much noise 
in my brain. What one needs to do is to sit 



SOUL FEEDING 81 

perfectly still and give one's disturbing 
thoughts a chance to ooze out of the mind 

and 

Yes, I know it is difficult at the beginning, 
but it soon becomes easy with practice. Some 
people have learned the art of helping their 
minds in the emptying process. There is such 
a thing as sitting perfectly still and — ^well, it 
is something like taking one's brain in one's 
hands and squeezing all thoughts out of it as 
one would squeeze water out of a sponge. In 
one way or another one can empty one's mind 
if one will only be still. When that is done — 
when the world and all its distractions have 
utterly vanished — ^you should turn your mind 
quietly toward God. Speak to him softly. Call 
him Father. Then open the Book and look for 
the precious bits of devotional reading which 
you have marked from time to time. Don't 
force yourself to read passages that don't ap- 
peal to you. Follow your appetite. Be natu- 
ral. When you have read a sentence pause and 
try to realize that you are listening to God's 
message to your own heart. Try to catch the 
tone of the Father's voice. Perhaps you will 



82 FOUR FEET ON A FENDER 

feel like answering him. Obey the impulse. If 
yon have just read, ^'Blessed are the merci- 
ful," and your heart feels like crying out, ^^0 
Father, make me merciful," by all means let 
it cry. Never smother an impulse to pray. 
Prayer always has the right of way. 



vin 

WHEN PRAYER IS AS NATURAL AS BREATHING 

IF reading one's Bible should be as natural 
as eating, praying should be as natural as 
breathing. It is breathing. We usually think 
of praying as something different from every- 
thing else we do in life — something, indeed, 
quite apart from life. As a matter of fact, 
it is the most lifelike thing we do : it is simply 
life itself at a concentrated and intense point. 
Somebody has said that life — ^true life — ^is a 
day spent with God. In spending the day with 
a friend we are always near each other, but 
now and then we like to draw up our chairs 
very close together and open our hearts very 
wide to each other. So in spending life's day 
with God we are always near him, but some- 
times our hearts get very full and we like to 
get just as close to him as we can and unbosom 
ourselves to him. And this is prayer. It is 
all there is of prayer. Call it what we will, 

83 



84 FOUR FEET ON A FENDER 

it is simply a matter of unbosoming oneself to 
God. It is not an unearthly thing which we 
must do in an unearthly way: it is a perfectly 
natural thing — as natural as the calm, sweet 
face of my dear old spring looking up to 
heaven. 

Did you ever notice how natural Jesus looks 
in prayer? I know that he often rose a great 
while before day and went off to a lonely spot 
to pray. I know that to some minds this sug- 
gests crucifixion of the flesh ; and I know there 
are good people who cannot feel that they are 
really following him if they do not begin the 
day with some sort of self-crucifixion. They 
must do something that is against the grain. 
They must go through a certain hard, unnatu- 
ral routine. They must force themselves to 
read so many chapters of the Bible before 
breakfast, regardless of whether they are ge- 
nealogical tables or inspirational passages, and 
devote so much time to prayer regardless of 
what they are praying. But Jesus did not rise 
before day to crucify the flesh. He rose to feed 
his soul. He rose not to resist a natural desire, 
but to yield to a natural desire. He was hungry 



WHEN PRAYER IS NATURAL 85 

for the Father and he did the most natural 
thing he could do — he rose, regardless of the 
hour, and went off to a quiet spot where he 
could commune with the Father without inter- 
ruption. 

Prayer never means much to us until we get 
rid of this strange idea that there is some- 
thing uncanny or unreal about it. It never be-, 
comes as natural as breathing until we come 
to think of it as something that is as natural 
as breathing. There are so many natural aids 
to worship that one never thinks of using so 
long as one thinks of prayer as an unnatural 
thing. This reminds me, by the way, of a little 
incident of my summer dreams. It was a moon- 
light night in the mountains and we were all 
sitting on the porch trying to listen to a rather 
noisy young fellow who had monopolized the 
conversation for an hour or more telling us 
about some of his remarkable discoveries. He 
said that he was making a speech one night 
when he had a sudden attack of stage fright and 
his knees trembled so that he thought he would 
fall. Then he got ashamed of himself and 
made a desperate effort to appear brave. He 



86 FOUR FEET ON A FENDER 

straightened himself up, clenched his fists, 
threw out his chest and put his right foot for- 
ward. ^^And do you know,'' he said, ^^all my 
fear disappeared in an instant and I became as 
calm as a May morning. That set me to think- 
ing and I discovered that if you want to feel 
a certain way the simple act of putting your 
body in the attitude that expresses that par- 
ticular feeling will usually produce the feel- 
ing you want." 

It was a brand-new idea to him and no one 
was cruel enough to tell him better; but when 
he went indoors there was a quiet laugh and 
then every man had a story to tell of how he 
had taken advantage of this simple law in his 
business or social life. One young fellow who 
had been reading the new psychology was so 
enthusiastic over the result of his experiments 
that he was disposed to accept the materialistic 
theory that all feeling is the result of appro- 
priate action. This did not find general favor, 
but all agreed that it is often possible to pro- 
duce a particular feeling and nearly always 
possible to strengthen it if it already exists by 
making use of the action that is peculiar to 



WHEN PRAYER IS NATURAL 87 

it. A successful drygoods man told how care- 
ful he had always been to get himself in the 
best possible shape before going to the bank 
for a loan. ^^I never go," he said, ^^ without 
looking after my clothes, my general appear- 
ance, the way I hold myself, my walk — every- 
thing — because I found long ago that in order 
to approach a banker successfully I must be 
in a certain frame of mind and that I could 
help myself into this frame of mind if I put 
on good clothes, walked down to the bank with 
a firm step and entered with an open, manly 
air of quiet confidence. ' ' Just then an old gen- 
tleman asked if any one present had made use 
of the same law in his religious life. ^^Why, 
that's a natural law," said the merchant. 
'^What's that got to do with religion?" ''My 
friend," replied the old man quietly, ''there is 
but one universe and one life, even as there is 
but one God. The religious life is not less 
a life because it is religious, but more. All that 
God has put here in the world is for the purpose 
of helping us live. Why should we make use 
of everything he has placed within our reach 
to help us in our business or social activities 



88 FOUR FEET ON A FENDER 

and never seek to turn these things to our ad- 
vantage in our religious activities? We are 
souls, it is true, but we have minds and bodies. 
If we must make use of our minds and bodies 
in our religious activities, why should we not 
use them intelligently and to the best advantage 
as we do when we use them in any other form 
of activity? If it is my privilege and duty to 
make the most of natural laws when I make 
a speech to my fellow men, why isn't it my 
privilege and duty to make the most of natural 
laws when I talk to God in prayer ? ' ' 

There are so many ways in which we can 
make our minds and bodies serve us in prayer. 
For example: Imagine yourself on your knees 
trying to pray. For some reason your devo- 
tional reading has been a failure: it has not 
made you feel like praying. But you are try- 
ing. You are trying to translate the feeble 
desires of your heart into words, but without 
uttering the words. That is to say, you are 
trying to pray without making use of anything 
but your mind. And your mind is moving 
slowly. Somehow you cannot get hold of 
things. You realize that you are not really 



WHEN PRAYER IS NATURAL 89 

praying: you are only doing a little thinking 
and you are not succeeding very well at that. 
You cannot concentrate your thoughts. What 
should you do? If you were a child at school 
and should discover yourself to be in this stupid 
state, you would know what to do. And you 
would do it. You would bring your body to 
the aid of your mind. You would open your 
lips and let them whisper the words as you 
form them. That would help matters a little. 
And if your teacher should be called out of the 
room for a moment you would utter them out 
loud. And that would help wonderfully. That 
was one of the earliest discoveries of your men- 
tal life and you were not slow to make use of 
it. And that led to another discovery. You 
found that speaking aloud would not only drive 
confusion and stupidity from your mind, but 
it would sometimes wonderfully stir up your 
interest. And you made use of this discovery 
also. Many a time you would work yourself 
up to a high pitch of enthusiasm just by shout- 
ing and listening to your own voice. By and 
by you were taught that this sort of thing was 
not refined and then you learned how to do 



90 FOUR FEET ON A FENDER 

your thinking and feeling with your mouth 
shut; but to this day you have not ceased to 
value these primitive secrets of your childhood 
and you do not hesitate to make use of them 
when it comes to a matter of — ^well, say a mat- 
ter of business. If you were trying to settle 
a matter of business and found yourself very 
stupid and you thought that you could help 
matters by speaking out loud, you would exer- 
cise your right to speak out loud even if it 
made the windows rattle. Now let me ask, 
Why should you not exercise the same right in 
a matter of religion? Why should you handi- 
cap yourself in praying by forcing yourself to 
think in unspoken language at a very stupid 
moment when by giving voice to your thoughts 
you might overcome your stupidity and suc- 
ceed in really praying? Why should you not 
exercise your right to pray aloud even at the 
risk of making the windows rattle? Not that 
you are likely to make them rattle. You are 
not going to shout at God. On the contrary, 
if you are conscious of his presence you will 
speak very softly. But you will speak: if you 
will follow the promptings of your heart you 



WHEN PRAYER IS NATURAL 91 

will utter yourself in words ; and you will utter 
the words softly, just as you would talk to your 
mother in a moment of great tenderness. And 
if you once obey the impulse you will continue 
to obey it, for you will find that the sound of 
your voice speaking softly to God will help 
you in ways that you have never imagined. 

There are other physical means which you 
will find helpful in overcoming stupidity and 
quickening the devotional feeling. You have 
noticed how an attitude of indifference usually 
begets indifference, while an attitude of ear- 
nestness often begets earnestness. This sug- 
gests that when you pray you should assume 
the attitude which you have always assumed 
when you were intensely in earnest. A healthy 
woman whose heart is yearning for God does 
not go to bed to pray, though she may throw 
herself upon it face downward. Nor does she 
loll lazily in a chair. 

Again you have noticed that when you ap- 
proach God in an humble and reverent spirit 
you naturally fall into an humble and rever- 
ent posture. This suggests that when you pray 
you should seek to quicken your sense of hu- 



92 FOUR FEET ON A FENDER 

mility and reverence by assuming the posture 
which you naturally assume when you approach 
God in an humble and reverent spirit. 

Some time ago I found that looking up in 
prayer weakened my sense of the presence of 
God. The tendency was to make me think of 
God as dwelling in the distant heavens. Since 
then I have bowed my head reverently as if 
I were standing before him and I have found 
it much easier to think of him as being actually 
present with me. 

There are many other little means which will 
suggest themselves from time to time if you 
will only keep in mind the fact that in praying 
you are engaged in a perfectly natural exercise 
in which the body and mind have a perfect right 
to serve the soul. They may seem trifles at 
the beginning, but as you go along you will get 
a better opinion of them, and by and by you 
will begin to count them among the little 
threads that make up the warp and woof of the 
beautiful garment of the Christian life. 



IX 



COMPANIONS FOR THE DAy's WALK 



WE have been talking about equipping our- 
selves for the day's task, as if such a 
thing were possible. As a matter of fact, we 
can no more equip ourselves to run a whole 
day than we can equip a locomotive to run a 
whole day. What we do for a locomotive be- 
fore it starts out will count in many ways 
throughout the day's journey, but all along 
the way we must shovel in the fuel and here 
and there we must stop for more water and 
more coal, and then there 's the rubbing and oil- 
ing, which must go on almost without ceasing. 
So, what we can do for ourselves at the be- 
ginning of the day will count in many ways 
through all the experiences of the day, but, 
like a locomotive, we shall be continually run- 
ning out of fuel and we shall need almost 
ceaseless oiling and cleaning to get us safely 
through the day's journey. 

93 



94 FOUR FEET ON A FENDER 

I see you are wondering how you are going 
to find time to live if you must take all of 
your time looking after yourself. But it will 
not take all of your time to look after your- 
self. I have an athletic friend who does so 
many things for his body in the course of the 
day that you would wonder how he finds time 
for anything else; yet his physical culture ac- 
tivities are no more in the way of his day's 
work than the few things I do for my body are 
in the way of my day's work. They take more 
time — a great deal more — ^but they add no real 
burden to his mind, and what he loses in time 
is far more than made up in increased effi- 
ciency: he can do almost twice as much work 
in a day as I can. 

What is his secret? Simply this: he has 
transformed his culture activities into regular 
habits, just as you and I from infancy gradu- 
ally transformed our ordinary health-and- 
strength-making activities into regular habits. 
And this, as you know, is the first secret of 
the art of physical living. If we had never 
formed any regular physical habits we would 
not be alive to-day, or at least we should be 



COMPANIONS FOR THE DAY'S WALK 95 

dragging along at a poor dying rate. It is 
simply impossible to live a physical life that is 
worth while if we must look after every breath 
we take to see that we are breathing properly, 
or if we miist keep an eye on all our move- 
ments to see that every muscle is given a fair 
chance. If we want to live physically — really 
live — ^we must have the help of regular habits. 

We have learned this to our cost. Our sum- 
mer vacation is a part of the cost. In our mod- 
ern life, men and women, especially women, 
drive themselves so hard during the winter, and 
so incessantly, that they can find little time 
for health-and-strength-making habits and 
when the winter is over they drop. Then they 
drag themselves through the spring and when 
the summer comes they are hauled up into 
the mountains for air — that is to say, for life — 
for the life they have cheated themselves out 
of by their irregularities. We simply cannot 
live a worth-while life physically if we do not 
have regular habits that will keep our lungs 
and tissues and pores and all the other organs 
and channels of our bodies wide open to life. 

And what is true of our bodies in this re- 



96 POUR FEET ON A FENDER 

spect is true of our souls. We don't like to 
admit it — somehow we feel as if it were a re- 
flection upon Christ to admit it — ^but we might 
as well face the truth. Try as we may, we 
simply cannot live a victorious spiritual life 
if we do not form regular habits that will keep 
the channels of our spiritual nature open to 
life — to the Spirit of Christ who is our life. 
And it is no reflection upon Christ to say so. 
All the glory of saving us and transforming 
us into his image belongs to him and we do 
not take anything from his glory when we say 
that if we expect him to save us and transform 
us we must do all that he has given us the 
power to do toward placing every part of our 
being at his disposal. 

What we must do is to learn the rules that 
are essential to a well-ordered spiritual life 
and put them into practice and persist in prac- 
ticing them just as my athletic friend practices 
his health exercises — until they become second 
nature. It is not as hard to learn these rules 
as we sometimes imagine. The thought of them 
appalls us, just as the sight of piled-up work 
appalls us; but experience has taught us that 



COMPANIONS FOR THE DAY^S WALK 97 

if we will go on with our work gently and per- 
sistently and not try to do everything at once 
we shall clear np our pile in the course of time, 
and the experience of many Christians assures 
us that we can clear up this problem in the 
same way. 

A good way to form good habits is to fix in 
the mind a few mottoes or truths which call 
upon us to do certain things and which act as 
constant reminders of the things to be done. 
To illustrate, suppose you had just finished 
your morning preparations and had started 
downstairs to breakfast. If as you go you 
should try to think of everything that is ex- 
pected of a Christian woman at breakfast I 
fear breakfast would be over before you began 
to behave as a Christian at all. You would 
not attempt anything so absurd simply as a 
woman, a mother, or as the head of the house- 
hold. You never think of saying to yourself: 
' ' I want to be a true woman at breakfast ; let me 
see ]ust how a true woman is expected to act.'' 
All you try to do is to see that you do not lose 
sight of the fact that you have undertaken the 
part of a true woman, and that a true woman 



98 POUR FEET ON A FENDER 

is a true woman everywhere and under all cir- 
cumstances. So, when you start down to break- 
fast as a Christian woman, you don't have to 
remind yourself that a Christian woman is po- 
lite or that she doesn't lose her temper because 
the toast is a little too brown ; you simply need 
to remember that you are living the life of a 
Christian, that as a Christian every part of 
your being is at Christ's disposal, and that 
therefore a Christian is a Christian everywhere 
and under all circumstances. If you enter the 
breakfast room dominated by the thought that 
you are at Christ's disposal you are likely to 
act as one who is at Christ's disposal, whether 
you remember that a Christian doesn't lose her 
temper over burnt toast or not. For if you 
regard yourself as at Christ's disposal you 
will not go to the table with your mind and 
heart set on self, and so you will not be criti- 
cal and hard to please. A woman may be so 
bent on self-gratification that if the toast is 
browned a shade beyond her orders she will 
lose her temper and destroy her happiness for 
a whole day: so a woman may be so bent on 
gratifying or helping others and doing God's 



COMPANIONS FOR THE DAY'S WALK 99 

will that she will not know or care whether her 
own toast is brown or black. Mind you, I say 
her own, not other people's. 

God does not perform miracles to encourage 
laziness, but I am sure that if we will do our 
best to keep the fact that we have put ourselves 
at Christ's disposal in mind we can depend upon 
him to see that we do not forget it even at such 
critical emergencies as the sudden appearance 
of burnt toast at breakfast. 

Along with this wonderful habit-making 
thought that we have put ourselves at Christ's 
disposal we should carry with us through the 
day another habit maker that is almost as won- 
derful, and that is the thought of our kinship 
with God and our fellow men. God is the 
Father of all men and women and we are all 
brothers. It is wonderful what these two 
thoughts will do for us whenever we take them 
with us as our companion guides under God for 
our day's walk. Once recognize them as your 
daily guides from God and they will come to 
you every morning like two friends and take 
their places on either side ready to go with 
you through the whole day. And they will 



100 POUR FEET ON A FENDER 

prompt you every step of the way. You will 
even find it possible to think of the cook who 
spoiled your toast as a human being who has 
a right to the consideration that one child of 
God owes another. 

Imagine yourself walking down the street 
after your morning's work between these two 
guides. You are glad as you go to think of 
God as your Father and as glad to remember 
that every human being is your brother or your 
sister. And an unutterable peace fills your 
heart when you remember that you have put 
your body, mind and soul at God's disposal for 
the day and forever. Suddenly a rude woman 
jostles you in the crowd and as suddenly Self 
springs to your tongue to administer a sting- 
ing rebuke ; but the guide on your left quickly 
whispers that Self no longer has any authority 
over your tongue: you have put your tongue 
at Christ's disposal and if Christ is not dis- 
turbed over that rude woman's conduct toward 
his servant there is no reason why you should 
be. And by his help you close your lips and 
pass on. 

A moment later you turn down a quiet side 



COMPANIONS FOR THE DAY'S WALK 101 

street and presently come upon a poor decrepit 
old man who has fallen and broken his arm. 
Pity springs np, but instantly Self rushes in 
to remind you of your engagement at the dress- 
maker 's. Why not go on and get your dress- 
maker to 'phone for the ambulance? But the 
guide on your left again reminds you that you 
are not at Self's disposal and the guide on 
your right whispers, ^^He is your brother" ; and 
the next moment you are playing the part of 
the Good Samaritan, utterly oblivious to the 
fact that half an hour's delay will put your 
work at the dressmaker's aside for a week. 

At the dressmaker's everything has gone 
wrong and, quick as a flash, something like a 
savage springs up from somewhere within you ; 
but before it can utter itself both guides clap 
their hands to your lips. You return to the 
crowded thoroughfare to do your shopping and 
soon fall into the hands of an irritable clerk, 
but just as you reach the verge of disgracing 
yourself the guide on your left whispers a calm- 
ing word and the thought of Him at whose serv- 
ice you have placed everything, even to your 
nerves, brings you to yourself again. 



102 FOUR FEET ON A FENDER 

There is a salacious play at the theater and 
the morning paper said something about the 
questionable character of the pictures in the 
show-windows. Something — is it Self this time 
or the devil himself? — something suggests that 
you stop and take a look at the pictures. This 
time the guide on your left reminds you that 
you have placed your eyes at the disposal of 
Christ, and you turn away with a blush at the 
thought that you were about to make such use 
of eyes that have been consecrated to his serv- 
ice. You have hardly settled down at home 
before the maid brings a card and you enter 
the parlor to find yourself face to face with 
an agent. Instantly Self springs up to show 
her the door, but both guides again hasten to 
remind you who you are, and the spirit of the 
Compassionate One inspires you to frame a 
kind word that sends the agent away refreshed 
by the revelation that there is one woman 
in the world who really recognizes an agent as 
a sister. You return to your work and a man 
downtown calls you over the 'phone to give 
you an opportunity ^^on the side" to invest a 
few hundred in a way that will give you a clear 



COMPANIONS FOR THE DAY'S WALK 103 

fifty per cent, at other people's expense; but 
the guide on your right begs you to remember 
that the people whom you are asked to help 
fleece are your brothers, and you spurn the 
offer, as you should do, as the offer of a traitor 
to humanity. By and by a friend comes in to 
make an engagement for an evening of exhaust- 
ing pleasure which, whether innocent in itself 
or not, would at least unfit you for to-morrow's 
duties, and the guide on your left again speaks 
to remind you that you have placed your body 
at the disposal of Christ and you give your 
friend the onlv answer a Christian can afford 
to give. You plunge into your work again and 
half an hour later you come to yourself with 
an overwhelming sense of weariness. The next 
instant the guide on your right places his hand 
gently upon your shoulder and whispers : ' ' God 
is your Father, and although he has been with 
you all through these trying hours you have 
not spoken to him once." And with that quiet 
voice in your ears you go to the door and 
turn the key that you may have an uninter- 
rupted little while with the Blessed Eestorer of 
harassed and tired spirits. 



104 FOUR FEET ON A FENDER 

Thus the day goes and under the guidance 
of these two faithful servants of the Supreme 
Guide, and by his unceasing help, you come 
at last to the close with the calm spirit of a 
child who can look into his father's face at 
bedtime with tenderness, unashamed and un- 
afraid. 



THE MAGIC WAND 

DO you know Grumbling Jane? I am sure 
you have heard of her. She has been the 
town torment for fifty years, so people say, 
though as a matter of fact she is only fifty years 
old, and there was a time when she was not 
Grumbling Jane, but a really respectable 
woman. At twenty-four she was a pretty, fresh 
young thing, possessed of a husband, two chil- 
dren and all the selfishness that the world 
cheerfully grants to a woman so long as she 
is a pretty, fresh young thing, and has reason- 
ably fair prospects. But at twenty-four her 
husband died, leaving her penniless, and the 
poor creature sat down in her grief and held 
her hands, while the neighbors, moved by com- 
passion, came and poured their kindness into 
her lap. And then the transformation came. 
Absorbed in her sorrow and herself, she never 
gave her neighbors a thought, except to look 

105 



106 FOUR FEET ON A FENDER 

for them as the ravens of God sent to provide 
her with bread ; and when in the conrse of time 
the bread supply ran low, she began to think 
of them as very careless ravens who needed 
to be scolded and made to do their duty. And 
from that day she has been Grumbling Jane — 
the unspeakable creature whom everybody 
knows under protest and avoids as a helpless 
man avoids a hard creditor. For Grumbling 
Jane is possessed of the idea that the world 
owes her a living, and the world has never had 
its doorbell rung by a more persistent collector. 
Just two blocks away from Grumbling Jane 
lives a poor woman whom I like to call the 
Widow Whitesoul. I don't think you have 
ever heard of her. She too has had her day 
of sorrow; for when her husband died he left 
her half a dozen children and twice as many 
unpaid bills. She cried herself to sleep every 
night ; but when morning came she washed the 
tear stains away and went bravely forth, glad 
of the chance to give the world a full day's 
work for a half -day's pay if only she might get 
rid of her bills and keep her children. By and 
by sickness came and the wolf crept up to the 



THE MAGIC WAND 107 

door. But not until the gaunt beast was at 
the very throats of her children did anybody 
find it out. Uncle Joe, he of the great heart 
and the big basket, found it out and filled his 
basket to the brim and went over to see her. 
And when he handed her the basket the look 
of gratitude that came into her poor starved 
face so transfigured her countenance that his 
heart melted at the sight, and all the way back 
home he tried to find an excuse to take her an- 
other basket to-morrow. He told some friends 
about it, and they, too, tried it ; for as you may 
know the world is always ready to trade off a 
basket of good things for one look of genuine 
gratitude. And they have been keeping it up 
ever since ; for as Uncle Joe says, when a body 
takes a basket to the Widow Whitesoul he al- 
ways gets the better of the bargain. 

I don't suppose there was a great deal of 
difference between Grumbling Jane and the 
Widow Whitesoul at the beginning except that 
Grumbling Jane's word was ^^self," while the 
Widow WhitesouPs was ^'sacrifice" ; but that is 
enough to account for anything. For when self- 
ishness, like a worm, eats through a woman's 



108 POUR FEET ON A PENDER 

heart and destroys the last trace of gratitude 
that God put into it, what is left, however 
pretty and fresh and young she may have been, 
is never anything more nor less than Grum- 
bling Jane. 

I wish we could realize how large a part grati- 
tude plays in every life that is really worth 
while. We never think of it as one of the fun- 
damentals — like faith or hope or love — yet when 
we try to conceive of the lowest depths to 
which a human being can fall, we almost in- 
variably think of an ingrate. For an ingrate 
is the one human being whom we can never 
by any stretch of courtesy call a brother. We 
instinctively feel that he is something less than 
human. Moreover, we know that the noblest 
spirits always excel in gratitude. And this is 
not all. We have never been able to define hap- 
piness; but when we try to recall our hap- 
piest experiences, we invariably think of those 
superlative moments when we were so over- 
whelmed with a sense of the kindness of God to 
us that we could do nothing but cry out, ^ ^ Thank 
God! thank God!" Apparently happiness is 
composed largely of gratitude. Still further, 



THE MAGIC WAND 109 

gratitude is the shortest way to real wealth. 
As there is no man so poor as he who cannot 
give thanks, so there is none so rich as he who 
abounds in thankfulness. A millionaire, de- 
void of gratitude, may grumble over a ban- 
quet; a poor man with a thankful heart may 
rejoice over a crust. '^What?" cried a starved 
woman over a stale loaf; ^^all this and Christ 
too ? ' ' Gratitude is the magic wand that trans- 
forms a crust into a cake, a threadbare gar- 
ment into a silken robe, a monotonous existence 
into a life of song. It is like a good appetite : 
to a hungry man the plainest food makes the 
richest feast; so to a heart full of thankful- 
ness the simplest life is the sweetest. To an 
unthankful spirit all life is a desert ; to a thank- 
ful spirit every desert is a rose garden. 

If all this is true, it follows that he who 
would enrich his life must cultivate a sense 
of gratitude. What can we do to develop this 
oft-neglected virtue? There are just two 
things : we must persistently think of the things 
we should be thankful for, and we must give 
utterance to the thankfulness that is already 
in our hearts. Mortal man naturally thinks of 



110 FOUR FEET ON A FENDER 

his ills. If he is not careful, his mind will 
be wholly absorbed by them. He does not natu- 
rally think of his blessings; it is a habit he 
can acquire only by cultivation. It is a true 
saying that to be thankful one must first be 
thinkful. 

Ungrateful people are always thoughtless 
and, as a rule, the thoughtful are the most 
thankful. I never knew an ungrateful man to 
sit down and count his blessings ; he only counts 
his acquisitions or achievements. And I never 
knew a grateful man to habitually count his 
blessings who did not become more grateful. 
Man is a great counter, but he is so apt to 
spend his time counting to no purpose. Some 
of us are always counting our chickens before 
they are hatched. If we would oftener count 
the chickens God has already given us, I am 
sure those to come would hatch out the better. 
Some of us, too, are always counting the things 
we have acquired or the things we have 
achieved. This is a miserly habit and at best 
brings us only the miser's selfish joy in count- 
ing his gold. At worst it sets a man to wor- 
shiping himself as his own particular provi- 



THE MAGIC WAND 111 

dence. If we would only count our blessings — 
the things that come to us from above — our 
thoughts, instead of centering in ourselves, 
would go out toward the Giver of blessings, 
and our hearts would continually melt with ten- 
derness at the thought of him. Moreover, if 
we would count our blessings we would enjoy 
an ever-deepening sense of security; for in- 
stead of resting our future upon our posses- 
sions or ourselves — both precarious crutches — 
we would rest it upon the Eternal Foundation. 

But if we want to be thankful we must do 
more than think; we must give thanks. Grati- 
tude is like love; it cannot live without utter- 
ance. It must be ever giving forth. The more 
we give the more we have. The more we give 
expression by word and deed to our love for 
our fellow men the more we will love them. 
"We must express our love or eventually we 
shall have no love to express. We must ex- 
press our gratitude or eventually we shall have 
no gratitude to express. The man who fails 
to pay his debts of gratitude inevitably becomes 
a pauper; soon he will have no gratitude to 
pay. Here is one of the great offices of prayer. 



112 FOUR FEET ON A FENDER 

We start in the Christian life with the idea 
that prayer is a harvest machine; we never 
use it but for ingathering. But if you will 
watch these saintly souls who have climbed up 
into the white light of God's love you will find 
that they use prayer largely as an outlet. They 
have almost ceased to go to God to ask for 
things ; they go to pour out their gratitude for 
what he has already given them. It is not un- 
til prayer becomes largely praise that it be- 
comes a delight. 



XI 



THE STRUGGLE FOR FREEDOM 

I USED to think that sitting before one's fire 
in the twilight mnst be the most nndi vert- 
ing of all human experiences, but lately I have 
have found it is almost like sitting at one's open 
window overlooking the street. Indeed it is far 
more interesting, for most of the faces I see 
from my window are strangers, while these vi- 
sions that are continually coming up in the coals 
are all familiar faces and they always appear 
in the midst of their history, like a portrait 
printed in the center of a biographical page. 
Then, too, so many of them have a way of melt- 
ing into new ones, like the dissolving views of 
a stereopticon. Yesterday I saw a little girl 
with eyes as blue as the sky and hair like an 
October sunset, and the next moment the vision 
had dissolved into a beautiful woman with the 
same eyes and the same hair, and in her lap sat 
— could it have been the same little girl with 

113 



114 POUR FEET ON A FENDER 

eyes as blue as the sky and hair like an Octo- 
ber sunset? And just a moment ago I saw a 
woman 

I wish you could see her as I saw her then 
and as she really looked just five years ago. 
Her face was a beautiful soul window through 
which one looked upon what seemed to be vast 
stores of that priceless treasure of womanhood 
which we call sweetness. Her sympathies, you 
would have said, were as deep as the unsounded 
depths of a woman's heart. Still, if you had 
looked carefully you would have discovered that 
they were lacking in breadth. She was one of 
those women who are always helping somebody, 
but who are usually interested only in helpless 
oases. There was a poor bedridden creature out 
near the cemetery who would never get well, 
and a poor little cripple on the next block who 
was gradually wasting away, and there were a 
dozen other cases quite as distressing, and these 
filled up her heart. 

When people tried to enlist her services in a 
good cause she usually said that her hands were 
already full. And they were. It keeps one 
busy to be an angel of mercy with fourteen 



THE STRUGGLE FOR FREEDOM 115 

helpless mortals to look after. But three or 
four years ago sometliing happened — she never 
knew what, — and she suddenly became violently 
agitated over the wrongs from which certain 
women in her town were suffering. For days 
and weeks she could think of nothing but the 
wrongs of those women. She was simply burn- 
ing up with sympathy for them. But as I have 
said, her sympathies, though deep, were never 
very broad and she soon narrowed down her 
interest to this particular cause. All her sym- 
pathy was for certain women who were strug- 
gling with certain wrongs and she no longer felt 
any interest in the poor objects of her care who 
would never struggle again. She became im- 
patient with the bedridden woman near the 
cemetery who, she now concluded, was bed- 
ridden simply because she didn't try to help her- 
self ; and with so many downtrodden women all 
around her she hardly felt called upon to waste 
time with the little cripple who, she was sure, 
really didn't need the sympathy she had lav- 
ished upon him after all. Also, having devoted 
all her sympathy to her struggling sisters, she 
had nothing left except the tiny bits of bitter- 



116 POUR FEET ON A FENDER 

ness and cynicism and sarcasm which up to this 
time had never formed more than a microscopic 
portion of her nature. And whenever anybody 
dared to oppose her cause she let him have 
them. And to-day — well, you should see her 
face as I saw it in the coals a moment ago. It 
is hard to conceive that the sweet face of five 
years ago could dissolve into anything like that. 
I don't know how to describe it, but did you 
ever eat a juicy peach that didn't have a par- 
ticle of sweetness? Did you ever have all your 
sweet milk turned to clabber by a flash of light- 
ning? 

I could tell you of many other women who 
have been overtaken by the same catastrophe. 
I know a woman who has become violently 
stirred over the temperance movement. She 
says she is fighting for the wives and children 
of the drunkards of America. Her soul is con- 
sumed with pity for every woman and child 
who suffers on account of drink. But she went 
into the fight without fortifying herself with 
the thought of her kinship with all humanity, 
and she has become so bitter against the saloon- 
keeper that her sympathies have been narrowed, 



THE STRUGGLE FOR FREEDOM 117 

her sense of justice and mercy dwarfed, and 
mucli of the sweetness of her nature destroyed. 
She has patience and mercy for the murderer in 
his cell, but none for the saloon-keeper, who 
often needs nothing more than the sympathy 
and guidance of good men and women to lead 
him into a better business. She has made her- 
self one-sided simply because she failed to rec- 
ognize that the Father of the drunkard's wife 
is the Father of the saloon-keeper, and that 
she is the sister of both. 

Now don't misunderstand me. I don't mean 
that a woman should not enlist in any cause that 
requires a fight, nor do I mean that the causes 
in which these women enlisted were not worthy 
of a woman's devotion: they were worthy of a 
woman's devotion. But I do mean to say that 
no woman can safely allow herself to be ab- 
sorbed in any cause, however good it may be, 
if she is so constituted that she cannot fight 
without endangering her sympathies or her 
sense of kinship with humanity. 

I do not wonder that we have made such slow 
progress in our efforts to break off the chains 
with which our fellow men have bound us when 



118 FOUR FEET ON A FENDER 

I think how fearfully hampered we are by the 
chains which we are continually binding about 
ourselves. A man thinks of the tyranny of — 
say — the ^^big interests/^ If he could onl^ 
break the chain the trusts have tied about him 
he would be a free man. A woman thinks of the 
tyranny of — say — man-made laws. If she could 
only break this chain she would be free. But 
a man binds himself with bonds which are to the 
chains that others bind about him as ship cables 
to cotton thread. And so does a woman. A man 
binds himself with ^^much business/' or a sor- 
did ambition, or a base appetite, or a destroying 
passion. A woman binds herself with fashion, 
society, a morbid craving for martyrdom, the 
enthralling sex idea and I know not what else. 
Perhaps the most distressing of all forms of 
slavery are those which we bring upon ourselves 
in frantic efforts to escape from other forms of 
bondage. A woman finding her will hedged in 
on every side, in a fit of desperation determines 
to defy what she is pleased to call the conven- 
tions. She thinks she will now be free, but in 
that act of defiance she meets the fate of the 
bird who in its frenzy to escape its cage flies 



THE STRUGGLE FOR FREEDOM 119 

against the bars with a force that breaks its 
wing and falls to the bottom never to j3y again. 
Another woman seeks emancipation through 
the divorce court and every night dreams of 
that happy time when she will be free again. 
But the door is no sooner opened than she finds 
her feet entangled in a maze which in all likeli- 
hood will hold her to the ground as long as she 
lives. 

The truth is, fighting for freedom always car- 
ries with it the peril of a new slavery. Fighting 
is a perilous business anyway: we must keep 
our wits about us or we shall lose more than 
we are trying to gain. The War of American 
Independence left our country as poor in morals 
as it was in purse. We reached a high ethical 
plane before the Civil War and we were at the 
very bottom again when it ended. The history 
of America for a score of years after the Civil 
War is a history of scandal. Public men did 
things in those days that would not be tolerated 
for twenty-four hours in our own day. A man 
must think twice before he fights. And a woman 
must think several times. For she has more to 
lose in a fight than a man. A common fisticuff 



120 FOUR FEET ON A FENDER 

will disgrace a decent man for a time — the more 
decent he is the longer the time, — ^bnt it will 
disgrace a woman forever. That is the esti- 
mate the world places upon a woman ^s decency. 
And even a moral fight for what one believes 
to be a moral right has its perils : one must keep 
one ^s eyes open. 

The chief peril lies in the development of un- 
natural antagonisms. Nothing enslaves a man 
or woman more completely than an unnatural 
antagonism. The reason the moral state of the 
country was so low after the Civil War was 
because the war developed an unnatural hatred 
between brothers that destroyed for a time our 
sense of the brotherhood of man. It is easier 
to start a war than to stop it and when peace 
was declared the fratricidal strife went on. It 
was no longer a fight between the North and 
South, it was a fight between man and man. 
Men, rid for a long time of the sense of human 
brotherhood, pursued their own way to their 
goal over the prostrate bodies of their fellow 
men. 

The moment a fight begins to develop an un- 
natural antagonism it is time to get out of it. 



THE STRUGGLE FOR FREEDOM 121 

A woman must get out of it. She has too much 
at stake. One reason why a woman must be 
more careful in the matter than men is that with 
her fighting easily becomes personal and a per- 
sonal fight of course means an unnatural an- 
tagonism. A man may deal with theories and 
things, but a woman deals with persons. She 
doesn't care to fight a theory: if she must fight 
she will fight the people who are back of the 
theory. She must deal with people. It is hard 
to make an enthusiastic campaign against in- 
temperance, but it is easy to lead the way in 
a fight against the saloon-keeper or the saloon- 
keeper's candidate. And when one is struggling 
against laws which limit a woman's rights it 
is so much easier to turn one's guns on the men 
who made the laws or upon man or men in 
general. 

And this, it seems to me, is the most unnatu- 
ral of all antagonisms. We all know how com- 
pletely sex antagonism dehumanizes a man. 
That eccentric abomination we call a woman- 
hater is either a monster or a monstrosity. If 
he is not a brute he is an abortion ; — he is never 
a man. It is just as natural for a man to b6 



122 FOUR FEET ON A FENDER 

drawn toward woman as it is for Mm to be born 
with the usual number of eyes, ears and limbs. 
I am sure of this because when I meet a woman- 
hater I have much the same revulsion of feel- 
ing that a man has when his small boy insists 
upon showing him a monstrosity at the side- 
show. And what is true of a woman-hater is 
true of a man-hater, only a man-hater is never 
a monster: she is always a monstrosity. The 
few women that the world remembers as mon- 
sters were not man-haters. You may say that 
this is too sweeping, for you have known some 
very sweet women, far from monstrosities, who 
insisted that they hated men. So have I, but 
nobody believed them : their sweetness betrayed 
them. For when a woman becomes enslaved by 
sex antagonism the first thing she loses is her 
sweetness. That is what makes sex antagonism 
so horrible: it destroys a woman's sweetness, 
which is the very essence of womanliness. It 
destroys other things also, but one does not 
need to mention them, for whatever else a 
woman may have, if she loses the essence of 
womanliness she is no longer worth while. 
Sweetness is not all there is of a peach, but the 



THE STRUGGLE FOR FREEDOM 123 

most luscious looking peach in the world isn^t 
worth having if it isn't sweet. And this is true 
of everything that God intended to be sweet, 
including women. There is absolutely no sub- 
stitute. A woman may speak with the tongues 
of men and of angels, and if she has not sweet- 
ness she is as sounding brass or a tinkling 
oymbal. 

And so in any declaration of independence it 
is of the utmost importance that a woman 
should keep this peril in mind and avoid com- 
mitting herself to any course that might expose 
her to it. For we have come to an age when for 
the first time in the history of the world sex 
antagonism has reached the dimensions of a 
problem. Every struggle has its own perils and 
this, it seems to me, is the chief peril of wom- 
an's struggle to realize herself. I am not refer- 
ring to any particular woman 's movement. It is 
the peril of the worldwide struggle of women 
for a larger share of life either for themselves 
or others. Just so long as a woman's sympathies 
and sense of kinship are as wide as humanity, 
and just so long as she pushes forward in the 
ranks of humanity conscious that she is a unit 



124 FOUR FEET ON A FENDER 

in the universal brotherhood, she can push as 
hard as she will and she will be safe ; but the 
moment she withdraws from the ranks and 
starts for her goal as an opposing or separate 
force she starts on a path that cuts defiantly 
across the golden rule, and immediately she be- 
gins to develop antagonisms that will overbal- 
ance all that her goal has in store for her. There 
is absolutely nothing worth while in store either 
in this life or in the life to come for a woman 
whose chosen path narrows her sympathies and 
whose goal shuts out of her vision the Father- 
hood of God and the brotherhood of man. 



XII 

OUR CHILDREN AND OURSELVES 

IWONDEE if anybody in the world is qnite 
as unfair as a parent. We often hear that 
what our children need most is love, but I know 
many children who would be glad to get simple 
justice. We imagine we give them far more 
than justice. The new baby is not in the house 
a week before we enthrone him as the center of 
the universe and cast ourselves and all that we 
have at his little feet. Before he is six months 
old we credit him with being a prodigy. We 
are sure Plato never looked more profound. If 
he notices a red string he has the taste of a 
Phidias. If he coos he has the linguistic talent 
of a Max Miiller. But let him have the misfor- 
tune to live to the age at which a healthy boy 
kicks through two pairs of shoes in a week, and 
he will have his ears pulled for being a dunce, 
and his mother will be mortified to death be- 
cause he has no more refinement than a Zulu. 

125 



126 POUR FEET ON A FENDER 

In otlier words, the less there is of a child the 
more we think of him, and when he grows big 
enough to demand all of our thought we think 
only of what he lacks. 

As a matter of fact, a boy in knickerbockers is 
far more ' ' wonderful ' ' than a cooing baby. Not 
long ago a little fellow carried his new bicycle 
over to a neighbor's to show it to a sick play- 
mate. The sick child raised his head from his 
pillow and his eyes fairly danced over the treas- 
ure. ^ ^ Oh, if I had a bicycle, it — it would make 
me well!'' he said. His little friend looked first 
at his wheel and then at the pale face, then at 
his wheel again — a long, lingering look; and 
then straightening himself up bravely he pushed 
the wheel over against the bed and said, ' ' Here, 
you take it ! " and turning around ran away as 
fast as his little legs would take him. And yet 
we turn boys of this sort out upon the common 
because we can see in them nothing but a barely 
possible future. 

A poor boy who just happened in the world, 
nobody knew how, and who had managed some- 
how to stay on in the little village where he 
happened until he was big enough to leave it. 



OUR CHILDREN AND OURSELVES 127 

tied up his little belongings one day in a bundle 
and started out to find the world. 

The way was long for the pale-faced stump 
of a child and he grew very tired and faint with 
hunger. In the heat of the day he spied a 
watermelon over the fence a short distance from 
the road. There had never been anybody to 
make Tom go to Sunday-school, and he never 
went. He always went as he was bent. And 
just now his bent was toward the watermelon. 
He ^ ^hooked'' it and was caught in the act and 
carried before the nearest magistrate. It was 
in a state whose laws expressly prohibit send- 
ing a child under seventeen to jail or to the 
chain-gang or to the penitentiary for a minor 
offense ; but Tom was only a stray boy, and be- 
sides. His Honor was a law unto himself, and he 
gave the pale-face ninety days on the chain- 
gang. Some days afterwards, the boy, who was 
now about spent, had a chance to escape, and as 
it was the first chance he had ever been offered 
in life so far as he could remember, he ac- 
cepted it gratefully and left. The officers who 
went after him with their guns made such a 
noise that it reached the ear of a reporter, and 



128 FOUR FEET ON A FENDER 

the next day the morning paper announced the 
recapture of the culprit and gave the facts in 
the case. 

A thousand good mothers, more or less, who 
were spending the summer as far away from 
home as their means would allow, became ab- 
sorbed in the home paper that night as usual, 
and when they had finished reading about Tom 
they one and all burned with indignation. 

*'What a shame!" cried everybody in chorus. 
*^If I were only at home I would see that poor 
boy's wrongs righted myself, if nobody else 
would do it. ' ' 

And every mother's son of them devoutly 
thanked the good Lord that thus far in life her 
boy had had a square deal and a fair chance. 

And yet there was not a soul among them all 
who could have come within a mile of guessing 
— if you had given her twenty chances — ^just 
where her own particular boy was on that par- 
ticular night. Boy had been left at home with 
father, because father could not be left alone; 
and mother had cautioned father in each of 
her twice-a.-week letters to be sure and keep a 
lookout for him. That was all she knew. The 



OUR CHILDREN AND OURSELVES 129 

neighbors knew a little more; only tlie Eye of 
Heaven knew the rest. 

Every morning during the long hot summer 
Father ate his breakfast alone and hurried to 
his office. He would have liked to have Boy 
breakfast with him, but waking up a boy is 
troublesome and it was too hot to start the day 
with trouble. They met at dinner and again at 
twilight, and then the house was so horribly 
empty that Father hurriedly ate his supper and 
went down to the club, while Boy hurriedly ate 
his supper and went out into the night. 

When the summer was over and we were 
looking over the wreckage, a thoughtful man 
said : 

^^I verily believe if you could look into the 
lives of the young men of this town who have 
gone wrong within the last ten years you could 
trace the downfall of three-fourths of them to 
the first summer they were left at home because 
Father could not be left alone. ' ' 

In due time the scattered nation of resting 
mothers came home again to resume the bur- 
dens of this weary world. 

^^I hope my son has been a good boy this 



130 FOUR FEET ON A FENDER 

suimner," said Mother, straining Boy close to 
the matronly bosom. 

^^Dunno," said Boy reflectively. 

That night when the young folks were in bed 
Mother repeated her hope to Father. 

'^But if he hasn't been," she added, ^'for 
goodness' sake don't tell me about it: I've 
enough troubles without looking for more." 

We might as well face the bitter truth: the 
world — or a pretty big slice of it — has no room 
for Boy. At best it only tolerates him for the 
man he is going to be, while fervently praying 
that he may not loiter by the way. At worst 
it banishes him from the human race and waits 
with a handful of rocks to see his head appear 
above the fence. No, this is not the worst. It 
not merely banishes him : it sends him out with 
the brand of Cain upon his brow. Give a dog a 
bad name and you might as well kill him. We 
have learned the lesson as to dogs and we are 
careful of the epithets we throw gently at them. 
And we have learned it as to men and women 
and girls. We call men, men; we call women, 
women; we call girls, girls; but we call boys. 



OUR CHILDREN AND OURSELVES 131 

Those Bad Boys! The very worst of it all is 
that Boy himself feels the truth of the gruesome 
proverb. 

^'Everybody believes that I am mean: what's 
the user' 

Why is it that the world has no room for 
Boy? Is it because he is so rude? Mother's pet 
monkey is rude. Is it because he is so noisy and 
destructive? Mother's screaming parrot is far 
more noisy and a hundred times more destruc- 
tive. Is it because he is always getting into mis- 
chief? It takes a maid's whole time to keep 
Mother's doggie out of mischief. Why has the 
world no room for Boy? 

No doubt there are bad boys in the world 
just as there are bad men; and I suppose if a 
census were taken we should find about as many 
of one as of the other. The main difference 
seems to be that the average boy conceals his 
good points, while the average man conceals his 
bad ones. The other day a little boat capsized 
in the rapids down the river and presently two 
men came struggling to the surface and shouted 
madly for help. A man's chances for life are 
not one in ten at that point in the river, and 



132 FOUR FEET ON A FENDER 

they knew it. Boy, sitting on a stone wall on 
the bank, took in the situation at a glance, 
jumped to the ground, got a rope, plunged in, 
and in two minutes two lives were saved. There 
was a crowd on the bank to cheer him as he 
came ashore; but he blushed, hung his head, 
and darted for home a mile and a half across 
the town. He ran every step of the way, and 
when he got there he didn't mention it. He 
said afterwards that he didn't think it worth 
while. If Boy had been a man, three to one he 
would have stopped to shake hands with the 
whole crowd, and then hurried off to get his 
photograph and family history for the after- 
noon papers. 

The world has about reached the conclusion 
that the heroes of peace are greater than the 
heroes of war. One day when it has had time 
to think a little more about it, you will hear it 
said that the greatest heroes of peace are boys. 
Boy is essentially a hero. He doesn't know it; 
he would be ashamed to have you say so; but 
watch him. In fire or flood, in dire calamity 
of any sort, give Boy a chance to get beyond 
the ropes and he will outstrip the relief corps 



OUR CHILDREN AND OURSELVES 133 

every time. While men stand around discussing 
what to do with the poor fellow lying on the 
walk with a broken head, Boy runs for the wa- 
ter. While father and mother are talking at 
the supper-table about the pitiful plight of the 
poor widow in the alley, Boy slips out to carry 
her a loaf of bread and a turn of wood. He 
likes to slip out. If he thinks of doing a good 
deed, he blushes and runs away, for fear some- 
body should find it out. If by some chance you 
learn the truth and ask him about it, he will 
try to throw you off the track by blurting out 
something unspeakably foolish or shocking. He 
has an unfathomable horror of the goody-goody. 
He is in mortal terror lest you should pat him 
on the head and call him a good boy. He 'd die 
this minute rather than have the other boys 
call him a ^^ comfort to his mother,'' though 
he would die twice for his mother any day. 

I have said that Boy is essentially a hero. He 
is not dependent upon the excitement of the 
hour. He does not have to wait for the shout 
of battle. He does not have to have a ^4arge 
and enthusiastic crowd" present to rouse him to 
it. 



134 FOUR FEET ON A FENDER 

The most heroic deed I can think of at this 
moment was done by a boy. Perhaps you have 
heard of it. Two boys were playing in the bel- 
fry of one of the college buildings at Oxford. 
They were standing upon a rafter when some- 
thing gave way, the rafter turned, and both lost 
their balance. The older boy caught the rafter 
as he was falling, while the younger caught the 
older by his feet; and there they hung. They 
screamed for help; but not a soul was within 
hearing. Between their screams the place was 
as still as death. By and by the older boy 
said: 

^^IVe held on as long as I can; I'll have to 
let go." 

^^Do you think you could hold on a little 
longer if I should let loose?" asked the boy at 
his feet. 

'^Eeckon so." 

'^Then good-by; God bless you," said the lit- 
tle fellow, and loosening his hold he was dashed 
to pieces on the stone floor a hundred feet be- 
low. 

Men turn their rough side in; boys turn 
their rough side out. Men are practiced in the 



OUR CHILDREN AND OURSELVES 135 

art of advertising their strong points and con- 
cealing their infirmities. A boy never adver- 
tises : he hides. The only way to read a boy is 
to get close to him. 

^^Oh, those horrid boys! those unspeakable 
boys!" cried a thin maiden with glassy eyes. 
But just then those boys were chipping in their 
Christmas dimes to buy a floral offering to 
place on the grave of a boy who had been dead 
three months. And the thin woman with the 
glassy eyes gathered her shekels together and 
spent them all for a new-fangled — ^but let that 
pass. The question before us is, when are we 
igoing to be fair to our boys? 

A man is adjudged innocent until he is proven 
guilty. That is his privilege. A boy is ad- 
judged guilty until he is proven innocent. That 
is his fate. Give the average boy a square deal 
and a fair chance along with the average man 
and I shouldn't wonder if he came out two 
laps ahead any day. 

Not that boys are especially good. No, no. 
But men are not especially good, either. I am 
simply pleading for a square deal. We don't 
play fair with our boys. 



136 POUR FEET ON A FENDER 

I know there are people who go to the oppo- 
site extreme. They sa,y boys will be boys, and 
they shut their eyes and wait quietly for youth 
to sow its wild oats. But that, too, is unfair. 
My boy has a right to a fair chance. I have no 
right to call him a bad boy, but neither have I 
a right to deny him my daily care, my instruc- 
tion, my warnings, my companionship. I can- 
not excuse my neglect of my boy by affirming 
that a boy must sow his wild oats. A boy does 
not have to sow his wild oats, but he is likely 
to sow them if I do not go along with him and 
show him how to sow good ones. 

Look for the good in that boy. There 's some- 
thing better in him, believe me, than ' ' scissors 
and snails and puppy dogs' tails.'' Your great- 
est hero was once locked up inside of a boy. 

^^But how about our girls?" Oh, well: 
** sugar and spice and everything nice," of 
course. But seriously, there is more good in 
the giddiest of girls than we ever give them 
credit for. The miracle of the worm trans- 
formed into a butterfly is not half so wonderful 
as the miracle you see when a great burden of 
responsibility is suddenly placed upon the 



OUR CHILDREN AND OURSELVES 137 

shoulders of some light-hearted, thoughtless 
girl. Let sickness and death come into the home 
and see what happens to the daughter who has 
never, until now, given a thought to anything 
but ribbons and beaux. There is nothing more 
beautiful than a young girl rising in a spirit 
of heroism to take the dead mother's place. 
That unspeakable girl in the next block who 
seems to have no more reverence than a clown, 
may have a sleeping heroine deep down in her 
heart, of whose existence she has never been 
conscious. Be patient. God may yet put his 
finger on the heroine and wake her up. 

Let us be patient with our girls. Let us be 
patient with our boys. Let us be patient while 
we wait upon God to do his perfect work. 

Some flowers bloom in a few months; some 
take a year; one, they say, takes a century. 
Some bloom in the light, some only in the night. 
So with our boys and girls. Some blossom out 
so quick you look upon them wide-eyed with 
wonder; some are so slow you can hardly see 
that they are developing at all ; and there is one 
you have worked with and prayed over so long. 



138 FOUR FEET ON A FENDER 

it looks like it will take a century. And some 
are not going to blossom out, may be, until a 
great darkness comes down upon their lives and 
brings out the stars. Let us be patient. 






XIII 



WHEN LOVE IS LOVE 



WHEN Jesus came into the world He 
found pretty much the same ideas about 
love that many of us have to-day. People said, 
^^We must love those who love us. We must 
be kind to those who are kind to us. We must 
stand by our friends. We must do unto others 
as they do unto us. If they show themselves 
friendly we must be friendly. If they send us 
over something nice for dinner we must send 
them something nice for dinner. We must be 
neighborly to the neighborly, we must be merci- 
ful to the merciful, we must be liberal to the 
liberal. And if men hate us we will hate them. 
If they are unmerciful to us we will be unmerci- 
ful to them. If they slight us we will slight 
them. If they don't care to notice us we will 
turn up our noses when we see them coming 
and pass by on the other side." 

To Jesus all this was horrifying. *'Why,'' 

139 



140 FOUR FEET ON A FENDER 

he said, ^^that isn't love; that's heathenish. 
Where is the heathen who would not be kind to 
those who are kind to him? If a man hates 
you don't hate him, do him a kindness. If he 
wishes you harm wish him well. If he treats 
you badly don't treat him badly — pray for him. 
If he tries to injure you don't try to injure him 
in turn : if he smites you on one cheek better let 
him smite you on the other also rather than 
smite him back. If he defrauds you of your 
cloak let him have your coat also rather than de- 
fraud him. If a man asks you to lend him any- 
thing do it if you can without stopping to ask 
whether he will do you a favor in return. Show 
real kindness to men. Give them something 
without expecting something in return. Don't 
treat men as they treat you, but do unto them 
as you would have them do unto you. That is 
real love. What you call love is not love — ^it is 
simply trading — selfish trading. You show a 
man a kindness not because you love him but 
because you want a kindness in return. And 
you hope to get more than you give. If you 
want to be the children of God you must seek 
to be like God. You must do as God does. Sup- 



WHEN LOVE IS LOVE 141 

pose God should love only those who love him? 
Suppose he should treat you as you treat him? 
Suppose he should be kind only to the kind and 
merciful only to the merciful? That is not 
God's way. It could not be his way because 
he loves. His heart goes out toward every 
creature he has made. He treats them all with 
kindness without stopping to ask who has been 
kind to him. He sends the sunshine and rain 
upon all alike. He thinks of those who forget 
him; he speaks tenderly to those who curse 
him; he loves those who despise him. And 
if you want to be his children you must do as 
he does. You must love the unlovely and the 
unlovable. You must be charitable toward the 
uncharitable. You must think of something 
kind to say to the man who says unkind things 
about you. You must love everybody. You 
must be liberal toward everybody. You must 
not think of how they act — that is the heathen 
^ay; yoii must think of how the Father acts. 
The Father does not limit his love to those who 
love him. He is kind even to those who do not 
appreciate his kindness ; he is kind even to the 
wicked who never thank him but only despise 



142 FOUR FEET ON A FENDER 

him. Love your enemies as the Father loves 
his enemies and you shall be his children indeed. 
Don't limit your mercy to your friends as the 
world does, but be merciful as your Father is 
merciful.'^ 

But Jesus went further still. He wanted it 
distinctly understood that the love he was talk- 
ing about was something entirely different from 
what some people who take a deep interest in 
their neighbors often mistake for love. It is 
something entirely foreign to the spirit which 
makes us take a deeper interest in our neigh- 
bors' faults than in our own. It is not the spirit 
which sits in judgment upon others. 

It is easy to understand why he insisted that 
we should not yield to the temptation to judge 
men. There is no love in that sort of thing, for 
love worketh no ill to one's neighbor, and we 
know that the judging habit is always working 
ill to one's neighbor. And it works ill to our- 
selves. It destroys the spirit of charity and 
feeds the flame of hate within us ; and besides 
it blinds us more and more to our own faults. 
Moreover, it is utterly futile, for the reason that 
we look for faults in others, hoping thereby 



WHEN LOVE IS LOVE 143 

to minify or blot out our own. After all, why 
should we judge others when we have so many 
faults ourselves? It is notorious that those 
who are so quick to speak of the motes in other 
people ^s eyes have great, blinding beams in 
their own eyes. It is the fault-finder who is 
fullest of faults. Why should we be so deeply 
concerned about other people's motes and so 
little concerned about our own beams? 

But Jesus would not have us go to the other 
extreme of exaggerated charity, which some su- 
perior saints affect. He would not have us so 
charitable that we would refuse to see the wolf 
that sometimes comes to us only half hidden in 
sheep's clothing. He would not have us hide 
our eyes from the cloven foot when the devil 
comes to us as an angel of light. He does not 
ask the good mother to imagine that the vile 
scab who wants to visit her daughter is every 
inch a gentleman. He would not have us under 
obligations to show our charity for show-people 
of doubtful character by giving them the en- 
couragement of our presence, even if the ticket 
costs us nothing. He does not move the hearts 
of fair women to send bouquets and perfumed 



144 FOUR FEET ON A FENDER 

notes to condemned murderers. We are not to 
turn away from our own faults and look for 
the faults of others, but on the other hand we 
must not turn away from the fact that if the 
fruit is not good the tree is corrupt. 

What Jesus insisted was that his disciples 
must be true lovers — true lovers of Grod and 
their fellowmen. We owe love to every man. 
And we cannot pay this debt by merely cherish- 
ing a tender feeling for our fellowmen. A 
mother cannot pay her debt to her child by 
cherishing tender feelings in her heart for him. 
Her love must go out to him through her eyes, 
her lips, her hands. She must love him with 
her whole being. She must pay him a thou- 
sand loving attentions. She must comfort him 
and make him happy with a thousand loving 
speeches. So our love for our fellowmen must 
go out to them in loving attentions. If a man is 
hungry we must give him bread. If he is dumb 
we must plead his cause. If he is struggling 
to overcome a sinful habit we must give him a 
helping hand. 

And we owe love to God. Grod is love. If 
that is true we may be sure that he cannot be 



WHEN LOVE IS LOVE 145 

satisfied with anything short of love. What you 
desire of your children above everything else 
is love. Nothing else will satisfy you. They 
may do this or that ; they may be this or that, 
but you must have their love. Nothing else can 
take its place. What God desires of us is our 
love. We may wear our fingers to the bone 
working for him; we may give him all honor; 
we may believe his word; we may speak with 
the tongues of men and of angels ; we may be- 
stow all our goods to feed the poor; we may 
give our bodies to be burned, but if we do not 
love him, we will utterly fail to satisfy his heart. 

But how can we learn to love him? 

I wish we were not always asking this ques- 
tion in a hopeless way, but would really look 
for an answer. For the answer is not hard to 
find. One thing is certain: the two command- 
ments — love to Grod and love to one's neighbor 
— are one commandment ; and if we keep one we 
must keep the other. If we love God we shall 
love our f ellowmen ; conversely, if we really love 
our fellowmen we shall love God. If then we 
cannot love one without loving the other, the 
first thing for you and I to look after if we want 



146 FOUR FEET ON A FENDER 

to love God more, is our love for our fellow- 
men. This indeed is the natural order. We 
do not begin loving in this world by loving God, 
but by loving some one else. Watch the birth 
and growth of love in your baby. He begins 
not by loving God, but by loving you. You first 
open up the little heart to yourself, and then you 
bring before that open heart father, sister and 
brother. Then you tell him about God until 
there comes before his little open heart some 
vision of God, and he begins to love God. How 
does the baby learn to love mother, sister, 
brother, God? By learning mother, sister, 
brother, God. The whole secret so far as we 
are concerned is in the intimate association of 
the child with mother, sister, and brother, and 
with the thoughts which bring before him the 
invisible God. Break up these associations and 
the baby's love will grow cold; he may even 
cease to love his absent mother. It is in asso- 
ciation that love is formed, and by association 
that love grows. 

So, if you and I have little love for God there 
are two things which we need to inquire about : 
first, our love for our fellowmen, and second, 



WHEN LOVE IS LOVE 147 

our knowledge of God. One tMng in the way 
of our love for God is our lack of love for some 
people we know. If we want to love God more 
we must love one another more. Love is love. 
We cannot cultivate love for one particular 
being and keep that love from overflowing upon 
others. We love all men more for having loved 
one well. We cannot cultivate a love that will 
go out toward God only. That love will overflow 
upon our fellowmen. Even so, we cannot culti- 
vate a love for our fellowmen that will not 
eventually go out toward God. We ought to 
learn men more, associate with men more, that 
we may love them more. Another reason, and 
perhaps the chief reason, why our love for God 
is so small is because we make so little effort to 
learn him. How do I learn to love my fellow- 
men? By learning about them. In the very 
same way we must learn to love God. God has 
given us his Book in which to learn about him. 
He has given us the place of secret prayer in 
which we may associate with him and thus learn 
him. What use do I make of God's Book? Do 
I search it to find out more about God? Is it 
my chief ambition to know that I may learn him, 



148 FOUR FEET ON A FENDER 

and obey him and be like him? What use do I 
make of my closet — my meeting place with God? 
Do I go to it to seek his presence or only to 
^^say" my prayers? Do I cultivate him? Do 
I value his companionship? If I wanted to love 
my neighbor more would I not cultivate him? 
Would I not associate with him more? If I 
want to love Grod more shall I stand afar off 
from God and look to him to perform some 
strange miracle that will bring my heart up 
against his own great heart? 

^ ' But how can I love one whom I have never 
seen?" One might as well ask, ^^How can I 
love?" for love is something that reaches out 
after the unseen. To contend that it is impos- 
sible to love God because we have not seen him, 
is to confess our utter ignorance of the nature 
of love. Love is spiritual and its object is the 
spiritual. The wife who is afraid that she loves 
her husband less since he lost an eye, or a hand, 
or a foot, or all three for that matter, does not 
love him at all — never loved him at all. We do 
not see with our physical eyes the real man we 
love. We see manifestations of him, and we are 
led to love him through these manifestations^ 



WHEN LOVE IS LOVE 149 

but when we are actually knit to the real man in 
him, we can see his body and even his intellect 
gradually pass away without loving him one 
whit less. What we see of the man with our 
eyes or perceive with our intellect we admire, 
but it is the unseen man that we love. If God 
had asked us to admire him we might have 
asked to see him; but he does not ask for our 
admiration ; he asks for our love. It is a fool- 
ish thought that we cannot hope to love Christ 
with all our hearts until we have seen him face 
to face. 



xrv 

HE HEALETH THE BROKEN IN HEABT 

GOD has nowhere promised that his children 
will be kept from trouble. Yet one is al- 
ways meeting people who have somehow gotten 
it into their heads that if they once recognize 
Grod as their Father he will be under obliga- 
tions to shield them from every wind that blows. 
(As if a father who really loves his children 
would shield them from every wind that blows !) 
And so the first time that trouble comes to the 
average Christian he is tempted to feel that he 
has not been treated right. Indeed, I doubt 
whether there are many Christians who have 
not been conscious at one time of trial or an- 
other of a distinct sense of disappointment in 
the Christian life: things have not turned out 
as they expected and they don't know what to 
think. ' ' The strange part about this awful trag- 
edy/' said a friend to me one day, ^4s that this 
old man who has been so overwhelmed with 

150 



HE HEALETH THE BROKEN IN HEART 151 

trouble in his last days is one of the best men 
I ever knew; I can't understand it." As if our 
Lord had ever said, ^'Come unto me all ye that 
are afraid of trouble and I will give you an 
easy time. ' ' 

God would no more keep us out of trouble 
than a man would keep his land from being 
plowed, his vines from being pruned, his trees 
from being shaken to their roots by the March 
winds, his son from being laid upon the sur- 
geon's table, if thereby his life might be saved. 
* No, we shall have trouble. We may have 
trouble even to the breaking of our hearts. God 
has nowhere promised that the heart shall not 
break. He has only promised that it shall not 
break beyond mending. ' ' He healeth the broken 
in heart." 

We often need to be reminded of this when 
prostrated by a crushing blow. It is then, if 
ever, that we feel like reminding God that he 
has not kept his word. Has he not promised 
that no trial shall overtake us greater tlian we 
can bear? Yes; but he has not promised that 
no trial shall overtake us, and, as for bearing 
it, there is time enough to decide about that. 



152 FOUR FEET ON A FENDER 

Do you not recall the great sorrow of years ago, 
when for weeks you carried about with you that 
horrible sensation of something pulling at your 
heart-strings — how you felt that your heart was 
broken, and that you could never survive, be- 
cause, forsooth, it was broken? 

But many a broken heart goes unmended. 
Some because they do not want to be mended, 
as some mothers who, when bereft of their chil- 
dren, nurse their sorrow and proclaim that they 
never want to recover from it. And some be- 
cause the wrong methods are used. He who 
depends upon Time to heal a broken heart is 
putting more on Time's shoulders than they can 
carry. Time heals many surface wounds, but 
it mends nothing that is once broken. And he 
who expects to heal the wound by throwing one- 
self into a whirlpool of dissipating pleasures 
will fail, because he does no honor to the Heart- 
maker thereby. 

There is no one so deeply interested in that 
heart as he who made it for his dwelling place. 
And there is no one who understands it so well, 
and who knows so well the treatment it needs. 
^^He healeth the broken in heart and bindeth 



HE HEALETH THE BROKEN IN HEART 153 

up their wounds. ' ' And the sooner we can feel 
this in the midst of our trouble the better. So 
much of time and of light and of joy is lost be- 
cause it takes so long to learn where to find a 
physician. So many of us never go to the 
Healer of Hearts until we have tried all the 
quack remedies. 

We reach the dregs in our cup of sorrow the 
moment we imagine that God has forsaken us. 
Nothing else is half so bitter. On the other 
hand, the bitterest cup overflows with honey for 
him who can read around the rim the divinely 
engraved inscription, ^^I will never leave thee 
nor forsake thee.'' Bolster up our faith as we 
may, there are times when the strongest of all 
temptations is to feel that God is no longer 
with us. And the temptation is only strength- 
ened when we turn from ourselves to see how 
it has fared with the best of his children. Abra- 
ham on the mount with uplifted knife; Jacob, 
prosperous in young manhood, but in old age 
bereft of his best beloved sons, and threatened 
by famine; David fleeing from Jerusalem for 
fear of Absalom; Daniel, the only man in the 
realm who prayed three times a day, thrown 



154 FOUR FEET ON A FENDER 

to the lions ; the Son of God himself crying out 
in his last agony upon the cross, ^^My God, my 
God, why hast thou forsaken me!" — these are 
the scenes which, meeting us at every turn, send 
us back to our own sorrow with the despairing 
cry, ^'Is his mercy clean gone forever? doth 
his promises fail for evermore?'^ But God for- 
sakes no man — not even his enemies. All the ex- 
pressions in the Bible which seem to point that 
way are simply presentations of the matter 
from our point of view. When God says, ^^I 
will never leave thee nor forsake thee,'' he is 
not talking poetically, though it is most beauti- 
ful poetry. He is stating a simple fact, and 
binding himself in a plain promise. He tells 
us that he is with us, that where he is he stays, 
and that whether we see him or not, we may 
always know where to find him, because he 
changes not. He cannot leave us. We may 
leave him. And that is as it usually happens ; 
we run off from him, and accuse him of running 
off from us. Then when we go back and find 
him just where we left him, we feel ashamed. 

Sorrow is an angel sent from God to do his 
bidding — if we are willing, and only as we are 



HE HEALETH THE BROKEN IN HEART 155 

willing. When we are suffering we often com- 
fort ourselves with the thought that now God 
has taken our salvation into his own hands, and 
is purifying us by pain, in spite of ourselves. 
^^I think surely I will get to heaven,'' said a 
tired mother, ' ' for I have had so much trouble. ' ' 
But there is no virtue in trouble. We count 
the lashes upon our backs and treasure up the 
drops of blood as so many shekels that will pay 
our way one day to heaven ; but the question of 
the Father will be not how many strokes were 
laid upon us, but how many we bore. A mother 
tries to punish her wayward boy, and he re- 
sists her will and spits in her face. She does 
not think, when she has finally won, that he de- 
serves a stick of candy for letting her whip him. 
And it is the child of that type who usually asks 
for the candy, as it is the child of God who 
usually rebels outrageously in suffering that 
wants God to give him heaven because he has 
had so much pain. 

Whether our sorrow shall yield sweetness or 
gall depends not so much upon what is in the 
sorrow as upon what is in ourselves. 

The first thing to do in trouble is to submit. 



156 FOUR FEET ON A FENDER 

The first thing a wayward child does when he 
is punished is to ask what in the world father 
wants to whip him for. Quiet submission would 
lessen the force of the blows and give opportu- 
nity for the reflection the child needs. It is not 
of prime importance for the child of God to 
know all about the nature of his affliction; but 
it is of prime importance that he should at once 
submit and place himself entirely in the hands 
of God. Perfect resignation will enable us to 
receive every affliction thoughtfully, and will 
usually enable us to see through our trouble be- 
fore we get to its end. 

The next thing is to be quiet. Noise intensi- 
fies pain. He who cries aloud loses his hold 
upon the rebellious nature within, which must 
be kept under at any cost. One should not talk 
to every one about his trouble. That oi^^ly fans 
the flame of discontent. Nor should one%e for- 
ever on the lookout for somebody to sympathize 
with him. People who do that soon forget the 
only One who can be truly touched with a sense 
of our infirmities. Nor should one ask every- 
body around why the Lord should let him suffer 
so much. 



HE HEALETH THE BROKEN IN HEART 157 

It is easy to mark every step a sufferer takes 
toward heaven. As we grow in grace we endure 
more gracefully. We become less noisy. The 
severest pain of which I have ever known or 
heard, failed to drive the smile from the face of 
a saintly woman who endured in silence, and be- 
tween the paroxysms spoke only of the love of 
Jesus. 

Finally, pain is purifying when it inspires 
prayer and a love for the Word of God. The 
sorrow that turns us away from the Book will 
never make us saintly. A whispered prayer of 
submission — not boisterous begging, but the 
quiet pleading of a divine promise — is the only 
medicine I have known that could quiet the most 
intense pain without in a measure destroying 
the consciousness of the sufferer. 



XV 

INASMUCH AS YE DID IT UNTO ONE OF THESE 

I HAVE been sitting here before my fire in the 
twilight thinking of the most amazing story 
that Jesus ever told. I mean his story of the 
great day of final sifting when every man will 
be sent to his own place. In that day, accord- 
ing to this story, there will be but one question 
asked. All that the judge will want to know 
will be whether we have truly loved. And in 
getting at the facts he will not employ the usual 
methods. He will not look into these things on 
which you and I have counted so much. He will 
not lay stress on what we have regarded as the 
great things of life. He will look into our every- 
day lives for the little deeds of kindness and the 
little acts of compassion which more than any- 
thing else prove our love. And it will be very 
surprising, for nobody keeps account of the 
things he does for love's sake, and one who is 
full of love for Christ does such things so natu- 

158 



AS YE DID IT UNTO ONE OF THESE 159 

rally that lie is not conscious that he is doing 
anything worth mentioning or indeed that he is 
doing anything for Christ at all. ^^Come, my 
Father's blessed ones," he will say 

By the way, did ever a mortal receive such a 
welcome ? Sometimes when we think of heaven 
— though it seems as if people seldom think of 
heaven nowadays — ^we say that we shall be glad 
if God will have mercy on us and not shut the 
door in our faces, but will let us just slip in 
quietly, for we don't feel that we have a right 
there anyway. And here we have a picture of 
the Son of God calling those who come to the 
door his Father's own blessed ones, and inviting 
them into their home which they have inherited 
— which the Father prepared for them a long 
while ago and has kept in readiness for them all 
these years. Let us not be afraid. The blessed- 
ness awaiting God's children is an inheritance 
prepared for us. 

But I have wandered. ^'Come, my Father's 
blessed ones," he will say, ^^come and receive 
the inheritance that the Father has prepared for 
you. For I know your life. I recall how you 
fed me when I was hungry and received me 



160 FOUR FEET ON A FENDER 

when I came to you a stranger, and how yon 
visited me when I was sick and in prison. ' ^ And 
you will be utterly astonished. Why, all your 
life you had longed to do something for Christ 
and you had never found an opportunity; and 
all you could do was to help a few people who 
needed help. But Jesus, reading your thoughts 
will say: ^^That is all right; the opportunity 
came when one of my little ones came to you for 
help and you helped him. Inasmuch as you 
helped him, you helped me. ' ' Think of it ! We 
can do great things for Christ simply by doing 
little things for our f ellowmen. 

A very rich man did you a great favor the 
other day, and yesterday you were wondering 
what you could do to show your gratitude for 
his kindness. ^^What can I do for a million- 
aire T' you said to yourself. Certainly you 
could not give him anything that he would want. 
He had no need that you could supply. What 
could you do? But while you were thinking 
there was a cry in the street, and you ran to 
the door to find the rich man's son lying upon 
the pavement, with his arm broken by a fall 
from his wheel, and a runaway horse bearing 



AS YE DID IT UNTO ONE OP THESE 161 

down directly upon him. To-day you received 
a letter from the rich man. '^You have done 
me a greater kindness than I can ever hope to 
repay," it said, and you stopped and said, 
' ' Surely there is some mistake. ' ' And then you 
read on. ^'You saved my son's life yesterday." 
And then it came to you as a delightful sur- 
prise that the kindness you had shown the little 
fellow was a kindness shown to his father. So, 
if our lives are full of kindnesses shown our f el- 
lowmen there will be many delightful surprises 
in the Judgment, for we shall find them all put 
down as kindnesses shown to our Lord. 

But there will be other surprises. There will 
be some on the left who have always set great 
store by their liberality and devotion. They 
have fasted twice a week and given tithes of all 
they possessed. They have endowed churches 
and colleges and orphanages, and some have 
given to the poor and some have paid their 
honest debts and some have spent their lives 
in teaching men the mysteries of the Word of 
God. But the Judge, looking into their hearts, 
will say : ' ' Depart from me ; for inasmuch as 



162 FOUR FEET ON A FENDER 

ye did it not for their sakes but for your own 
gain or glory, ye did it not unto me.'^ 

Many a man (and many a woman) has 
fed the hungry and received the stranger and 
clothed the naked and visited the sick and the 
prisoner, and carefully set all these things down 
to his credit with the idea that they would en- 
title him to a place at the right hand in the 
Judgment. But the good deeds that are done 
to be credited to one's account in heaven are 
not the good deeds of this story. The deeds 
which are here recorded have not been set down 
at all. They were not done with an eye to re- 
ward; they were done for love's sake and there- 
fore no account was kept of them. Who ever 
heard of keeping an account of deeds done for 
love's sake? If these men had set down these 
deeds to their credit they would have come into 
the presence of God puffed with pride, and when 
their deeds were called out they would have 
struck the attitude of a Pharisee who is about 
to pray or give alms at the street-crossing. But 
when we do a thing for love's sake we never 
think we have done anything worth mention- 
ing or remembering, and when these men and 



AS YE DID IT UNTO ONE OF THESE 163 

women heard their good deeds called out they 
were astonished. They thought there must be 
some mistake. They were not aware that their 
lives in God's service had been very fruitful 
or very beautiful. They had often mourned 
their unprofitableness. How often they had 
wished for an opportunity to do some great 
thing for God, and how often they had repented 
for failing to make the most of the opportu- 
nities God had given them ! Many of these men 
and women had lived in a very narrow, obscure 
place. They were plain, humble people of the 
everyday sort with no talent for anything that 
they could discover. They could not preach; 
they could not carry on missionary enterprises ; 
they could not build memorial churches. They 
could not even stammer out a helpful word in 
prayer-meeting. How could they be of any 
service to God? All their lives they had longed 
for an opportunity to do some great thing for 
God, and the opportunity, so far as they could 
see, never came. But while they were longing 
they followed the promptings of their hearts, 
and as their hearts were full of love for Christ 
they were led to look after his little ones. They 



164 FOUR FEET ON A FENDER 

did not do it with an eye to future gain. They 
did it for love's sake. They loved Christ and 
their fellowmen, and with this love in their 
hearts they were drawn as by a magnet to those 
who were in distress. It did not occur to them 
at the time that it meant anything much — surely 
not as much as a sermon or a prayer-meeting 
talk or a large subscription to a memorial 
church. What must have been their astonish- 
ment when standing before the judgment seat 
they heard not a word concerning any of those 
religious acts which they were accustomed to 
hold in such high regard when they lived, while 
much was made of the little deeds of kindness 
which they had hardly thought worth counting ! 

How close it all comes to our hearts! How 
it glorifies the common, everyday duties of life ! 
We do not need to have great opportunities or 
great talents to do great things for God. We 
only need to have a heart full of love for Christ 
and follow its promptings. 

If I love a man I will not kick his dog. Even 
if I don't like dogs I will convince myself that 
his dog is unusually likable for a dog. In other 
words, if I love a man my love will overflow 



AS YE DID IT UNTO ONE OP THESE 165 

on all that is his. My love will show itself not 
only in my conduct toward him but in my con- 
duct toward all that is dear to him. I will pat 
his little boy on the head. I will smile at his 
baby. I will notice in passing how beautifully 
the flowers are growing in his garden. I know 
perfectly well that there is not a man in the 
world who will believe that I love him if I kick 
his dog or his boy and send him howling home, 
or if I find his children hungry and refuse to 
feed them ; or if I find them thirsty and refuse 
to give them drink. And you know just as well 
that there isn't a man living who could con- 
vince you that he loved you if he were unkind 
to those you love. 

Why should we deceive ourselves? Why 
should we persuade ourselves that we love God 
if we are not kind to his children? How can 
we imagine that he will take our professions 
of love seriously if we let his hungry children 
go unfed, if we forget his children who are sick 
or in prison? We must not neglect to tell God 
of our love, to praise his name, to stand up for 
his cause, but we must remember that our love 



166 FOUR FEET ON A FENDER 

for him amounts to little if it does not overflow 
upon those who are dear to him. 

What a glorious thought it is that God takes 
the kindnesses we show his children as kind- 
nesses shown himself ! If that means anything it 
means that God has a parental heart, for that 
is what every father and every mother does. If 
a man shows your child a kindness you accept 
it as a kindness shown to yourself. You value 
it even more than a kindness shown directly 
to yourself, for you feel that it is a double 
kindness — a kindness shown both to your son 
and to you. We must remember this in all our 
dealings with our fellowmen. It will make the 
day brighter. It will make kind deeds easier 
and pleasanter. You delight in doing a favor 
for Mary Smith because her mother — ^now in 
heaven — ^was your best friend. It is a joy to 
show a kindness to those Jones girls because 
their mother — well, you can never forget her 
kindness to you when you were ill. How delight- 
fully the day would pass if all the people you 
met were sons and daughters of Edith Smith 
or Margaret Jones! But the day would pass 
more delightfully still if you should love God 



AS YE DID IT UNTO ONE OF THESE 167 

with all your heart and could remember that 
all the people you meet are the sons and daugh- 
ters of God. Isn't this the secret of the highest 
social happiness — to feel always that the men 
and women we meet are the sons and daughters 
of the best Friend we ever had and still have? 



XVI 

OVER THE EMPTY CRADLE 

THERE are no faces in the coals to-day. 
But a vision came to me a moment ago 
of a bowed figure whose face I am glad I did 
not see. It was the figure of a man I saw years 
ago sitting alone by a little coffin that rested 
on a backless bench in a rude little meeting- 
house in the mountains. A little bunch of red 
and pink roses tied with a bit of blue ribbon 
lay on the coffin lid, and there was a little knot 
of curious, cold-blooded folk gazing now at 
the coffin, and now at the figure of the young 
man who leaned over it with his face buried 
in his hands trying to stifle the sobs which 
convulsed his manly frame. He was not one 
of them — ^you could see it at a glance — and no 
heart went forth toward him because he had 
committed the unpardonable sin of being better 
than themselves. 

This was all that I saw, but I remembered 

168 



OVER THE EMPTY CRADLE 169 

having heard at the time that there was a 
young heart-broken wife lying hopelessly sick 
at home trying to nurse a sick baby, while her 
only earthly comforter had gone off with her 
firstborn to put it out of her sight forever. No, 
not forever, for within a week she too would 
go. And I remembered also that the young man 
himself was ill and threatened with the loss 
of his vision. And they were poor. And they 
were God's children. 

I have been thinking how that scene tried my 
faith. It would have tried yours if you had 
been there. Not until I had left the little 
meeting-house far behind me could I under- 
stand the words of comfort which my poor lips 
tried in vain to utter. Nor do I understand 
them well now. But I have learned this much : 
when I have prayed for light and do not see 
it, I do not forget that God sees it and that 
it is enough for me to know that there is light. 
We cannot see God through our tears; or if 
we do it is like the reflection of the sun in trou- 
bled waters. I should not judge my Master by 
the distorted view I get of him through my 
tears any more than I would judge my mother 



170 FOUR FEET ON A FENDER 

by the glimpse I have had of her face in a 
spoilt mirror. 

I wish we could remember that this simple 
fact — that the first burst of grief is always 
blinding — fixed in the mind at the beginning of 
one's hour of darkness is worth more than all 
the help of those who were ^'born to solace 
and to soothe.'' The tears which cleanse our 
vision first obscure it. This is as true of our 
intellectual and moral vision as it is of our 
physical eyesight. When the heart is over- 
whelmed all our views are distorted. Men ap- 
pear as trees walking. The look of pity in 
the face of God is mistaken for a frown; the 
rod we would kiss appears as a cruel sword 
dripping with blood. If we would only remem- 
ber this! If we would only — when our hour 
of trial comes — go off to some quiet spot and 
whisper over and over again to our hearts: 
*^This sorrow has blinded me; things are not 
what they seem ; in my present condition I can- 
not afford to trust my eyes, my judgment, my 
feelings. I cannot afford to judge God by what 
I see of him through my tears; I am in no 
condition to answer these questions which 



OVER THE EMPTY CRADLE 171 

knock so loudly at my heart ; I must wait ; there 
is a whole eternity in which to find out the 
truth about God's dealings with me." It is 
because we forget — ^it is because we cry out be- 
fore we can understand what has happened — 
that we fall into so many mistakes which can 
only add sorrow to sorrow, and afterwards 
overwhelm us with humiliation. ^^I cannot 
think of God as anything but harsh and cruel,'' 
said a mother to me one day; ^^why does he not 
explain his conduct to me?" I replied: ^'If 
your little daughter came to you complaining 
of your harshness and cruelty and demanded 
to know the reason for your conduct, would you 
trouble yourself to explain? Would you not 
wait until she was in a mood to understand and 
accept an explanation? And if she changed 
her attitude and begged forgiveness for her 
harshness would you not quickly take her in 
your lap and tell her all?" 

How often we delay our healing by continu- 
ing in such an attitude before God that he can- 
not tell us anything. It was poor Job's trouble. 
He talked and talked; and his friends talked; 
but he got no relief. Then God rebuked him 



172 POUR FEET ON A FENDER 

for darkening counsel ^^by words without 
knowledge," and lie saw his mistake, confessed 
that he did not know what he was talking about, 
and '^ abhorred himself in dust and ashes." 
^^And the Lord turned the captivity of Job." 
So long as grief keeps our eyes closed there is 
nothing for us to do but to keep our mouths 
closed. David understood this, and said: ^^I 
was dumb; I opened not my mouth, because 
thou didst it." 

When the blinding tears have done their 
work, the lips may open with safety, for they 
will open with praise. It is hard to believe it 
now — in the midst of darkness that can be felt. 
But think a moment. Five years ago your first- 
born went home. You felt then as you feel now ; 
you felt that you could never think of the lit- 
tle one again without the horrible sensation 
of something gnawing at your heart. But five 
long, lonely years have passed and with them 
the clouds: the sun shines out now, and al- 
though you may look up into the clear azure 
still watching for the glimpse of a baby face, 
the sweetest, happiest, blessedest thought of 
your life — the thought which strengthens you 



OVER THE EMPTY CRADLE 173 

when all others fail — is that you have one pre- 
cious cherub safe at home. You would not 
have her back in this cold world for all the uni- 
verse. You would not have her return to you, 
for you are preparing to go to her. And so it 
will be with the present sorrow if you will but 
look up. Let the tears fall if they will, but 
look up. Solace is for those who seek it. We 
may extract sweetness out of woe if we will, 
but if we let it alone it will yield only gall. 

There is never a sorrow so bitter but we 
seek to add to it. It is easy to fall in love with 
misery. Many a broken heart is never healed 
because the broken-hearted one does not want 
to be healed. Torn from her child, the moth- 
er's first impulse is to bind her soul to grief. 
She seeks to keep her heart bleeding by think- 
ing of what she might have done, and blaming 
herself for the little son's sickness and death. 
Or she probes her heart to find out whether 
she is rebelling against God. It is wise to ex- 
amine ourselves, but when the heart is quiver- 
ing with pain God would not have us probe it. 
If the heart is to be healed we must let it alone 
and allow the Physician to look after it. Be a 



174 FOUR FEET ON A FENDER 

good patient ; put yourself in the hands of your 
Physician and think of him. If you cannot 
think of him, do the next best thing: think of 
your glorified child. Not your suffering child, 
but your glorified child. Put yourself in her 
place. While she was with you your one 
thought was her happiness ; you gave your life 
for her; you were wholly unselfish, self- 
sacrificing. Why should you descend from 
this high estate and give yourself to selfish 
thoughts? Why should you think of your own 
sorrow when you can think of her joy? You 
prayed that she might be happy; it was hard 
to pray for anything else: now that God has 
answered your prayer, will you complain be- 
cause the answer was so different from your 
expectations ? In praying for her happiness did 
you intend only to pray for your own happi- 
ness? 

Put yourself in her place. You torture your 
heart continually with the thought of what 
she suffered : you cannot help feeling that God 
was cruel to allow it; that he was cruel not 
to allow her to remain here with you. Does she 
now torture her heart with the thought of what 



OVER THE EMPTY CRADLE 175 

she suffered? Does she care? Looking up into 
his face, does she think that he is cruel? Put 
yourself in her place. How often, when you 
held the precious burden in your lap and 
pressed the little hand to your lips and counted 
its dimples — how often the mists came over 
you when you thought what those little hands 
would have to do ! How often your heart ached 
at the thought of the hard, stony paths those 
little pink feet would have to tread ! ^ ^ Oh, the 
world is too hard and cold for my babe!'' you 
said over and over again. Can you be angry 
with God that he should agree with you? Is 
she angry? Put yourself in her place. With 
all your wealth of love, did you ever feel that 
your care would be sufficient for her? Did you 
ever feel satisfied that you were doing all that 
ought to be done? Did you not feel that you 
were not equal to the responsibility placed upon 
you? Did you not feel that with all your love 
and care you could not shield her as you would 
like from the hardships of life? But now she is 
in the hands of One who can do the best and 
who will do the best because his love exceeds 
even a mother's love. If we know anything at 



176 FOUR FEET ON A FENDER 

all about Jesus, we know that his heart over- 
flowed with a tender and gracious affection for 
children. It was natural that his pure soul 
should go forth toward those whose lives illus- 
trated the virtues he so highly prized. In a 
world darkened by sin they were his most con- 
genial companions. They refreshed his spirit. 
And he took them in his arms and laid his hands 
upon them and blessed them. Surely you can 
never forget that. Can you not give thanks 
to God that the tender Shepherd who took the 
little ones in his arms nearly nineteen hun- 
dred years ago is the same Jesus into whose 
hands you committed the spirit of your own 
child when she was called up higher? 



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